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EUROPE'S Handicap- 
Tribe AND Class 



By L. p. GRATACAP 

AUTHOR OF 

"Why the Democrats Must Go" 




And when you hear historians talk of thrones 
And those that sat upon them, let it be 

As we now gaze upon the mammoth's bones, 
And wonder what old world such things could see. 

— Don Juan 



New York 

Thomas Benton 

1915 



y. 



G6 



Copyright, 1915 

By 
L. P. Gratacap 



m 151915 



THE EDDY PRESS CORPORATION 
CUMBERLAND, MARYLAND 



CI.A414576 



J ARMAGEDDON 

;;^ The air is vibrant, tense, and o'er all lands 

There broods a shadow dread, as of despair, 
^ That chills all hope and deadens even prayer! 

^ From Thule far to India's burning sands 

And where the waves of Ocean break on strands 
Remote, 'neath Southern constellations fair, 
All eyes are turned to Europe where 
Flame War's red ensign and its blazing brands! 

Earth shudders at the sound of conflict dire 
As on a threefold battleline are flung 

The mightiest hosts the world has seen, on fire 
With battle's lust of blood, while high uphung, 

In balance stern of God, there hangs the fate 

Of Empires that the dread decision wait! 

And now that mighty maelstrom slowly draws 
With ever-widening sweep and whelming might 
The nations that have stood aloof I Despite 

Their wish and will they now are swept, like straws. 

In narrowing circles, nearing the dread Jaws 
Of Ruin, threatening to engulf them quite — 
Helpless to stem the swirl, escape the blight 

Of fateful war which now the whole world awes! 

Within the shadow of the Pyramids, 
And to the lands where history began, 

And Ocean's isles. War's challenge comes and bids 
The nations turn to Europe's battle- van! 

Is this the doom the ancient Prophets show? 

Are Armageddon's thunders rumbling low? 

H. T. Sudduth 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. The Tribe 9 

II. The System of Class 22 

III. The Confusion of Tribes 34 

IV. The Origins of Class 81 

V. Tribal Wars and Class Domination . 120 

VI. Religious Bigotry and the Inquisition 

Products of Tribe and Class . . . 192 

VII. The Present War 205-- 

VIII. America's Neutrality 288 

IX. Germanization 295 



FOREWORD 

Almost every one has said something about the 
present war, and they have said very different 
things. Even when agreeing in their general 
contentions, their idiosyncrasies of feeling, their 
guise of mind, or some intangible residue of faith, 
as with the ministers, have made them impart to 
any notion they have of it, a separate though not 
always an easily distinguishable tone. At any 
rate they have not exactly repeated each other. 

The statesmen have championed their countries, 
the wits have satirized their own countries, and 
other people's countries, 'the poets and senti- 
mentalists have been eloquent, touching, and 
effective, the college professors and presidents have 
displayed wisdom, (as for what else are they made 
for?) ransacked history, and professor and presi- 
dent-like have gravely instructed an inferior world 
about it, and the observers, those who have been 
in the battles, in the cities, behind and before the 
scenes, have picturesquely noted much. 

The essayists (Chesterton, Wells, Shaw, Belloc, 
Ellis, Millioud, Delbruek, etc.) have risen to un- 
equalled heights of sarcasm, biting analysis, and 
hammer-like emphasis of triple-tongued sentences, 
and the pacifists, the clergy, the various afflicted 
companies of the deuteroscopoi, have seen in it 
DESTINY, the hand of GOD, the prelude to the 
Everlasting Peace, the Rise of Democracy, and 
almost anything else their fervent hearts, and 



spiritualized minds and thirsting imaginations de- 
sired to see in it. But no one specifically has 
written of it as an Enemy of Europe, as one who 
would welcome Europe's wholesale destruction, 
in a political and social way; as an irreconcilable 
American, as a pervert, if you like, to an ultra 
Star-Spangled-Bannerism, and yet one not a 
socialist, or a mobocrat, not an I. W. W. not an 
agnostic, or an atheist, not a suffragist, or one in 
any way interested in the afflictions of Progressiv- 
ism. 

This book has been written by him. 



EUROPE'S HANDICAP- 
TRIBE AND CLASS 

CHAPTER I 

The Tribe 

The tribe is the first social unit that marks the 
emergence from savagery of the aboriginal man, 
unless indeed under a supernatural interpretation 
we assign the beginnings of society to divine guid- 
ance. That interpretation has only a restricted 
value, locally and philosophically, and in the 
gregarious invention of the TRIBE we encounter 
man's first instincts in government. The under- 
lying ethnic propulsions that secured the social 
coherence called the TRIBE were probably 
simple, certainly not lofty, the mere animality of 
herding, the mere animality of breeding, the mere 
animality of securing food and help against 
enemies, were its useful and necessary causes. 
Underlying the tribe idea, quite aboriginally and 
universally was the idea of kinship, by a common 
origin in an original parent. We are told, (Sir 
Henry Sumner Maine), that it has been found 
"that among rude and partially nomad communi- 
ties great numbers of kindred, whom we should 
keep apart in mind, and distinguish from one 
another in language, are grouped together in 
great classes and called by the same general 
names. Every man is related to an extra- 



10 Europe's Handicap — 

ordinary number of men called his brothers, to an 
extraordinary number called his sons, to an extra- 
ordinary number called his uncles". 

John Richard Green no less emphatically asserts 
the family bond of early tribal societies among the 
Anglo-Saxons. He says, (History of the English 
People) ; ''kinsmen fought side by side in the hour 
of battle, and the feelings of honor and discipline 
which held the host together, were drawn from the 
common duty of every man in each little group of 
warriors to his house. And as they fought side 
by side on the field, so they dwelled side by side on 
the soil. Harling abode by Harling, and Billing 
by Billing; and each 'wick' or 'ham' or 'stead' or 
'tun' took its name from the kinsmen who dwelled 
together in it." 

The tribal incentives we have enumerated made 
the first co-operative societies, and because all 
these exigencies were extremely personal, that 
developed in the tribe a distinct centralization of 
interest, which excluded all consideration of others 
rights, or at least overwhelmed their considera- 
tion in the more practical and indulgent emphasis 
of their own. Everything in an aboriginal en- 
vironment reinforced this centripetal tendency. 
Self-preservation, as the first law of nature com- 
pletely sways all primordial society. The TRIBE 
becomes the macrocosm of the human units it 
encloses. What they are, it is. The passions of 
the individual are added together in the passions 
of the TRIBE, and in the tribe the passions gain- 
ing in mass, gain in impetus, and obliterate reason. 



Tribe and Class 11 

But there is something more ominous. Primal 
instincts are ferocious. Hate, Envy, Revenge, 
Jealousy, Pride, Avarice, Lust, possess a fearful 
sway in the aboriginal heart, but they are occa- 
sional, spasmodic, accidental, varying in tempera- 
ments, varying in violence and individual traits. 
Under the culture of economic interests and tribal 
elation, when they express the consolidated egot- 
^ism of a group, they become fixed, inherited, and 
irritable. As primal emotions in individuals, they 
come and go like storms in the sky, but as rooted 
entities in character, when the TRIBE assumes 
them, they secure an impregnable regnancy in the 
feeling of the tribe, and are always observable, or 
felt or exercised. They enter then into the 
racial texture; they constitute a good portion of 
racial antipathies, and may always underlie an 
apparent amiable or apathetic intercourse, hidden 
but potential. The TRIBE sentiment never dies 
out, the accidents of livingonly deepen, perpetuate, 
dignify it, and it may, under the soothing ascrip- 
tions of self-importance grow into a coercing pas- 
sion of itself, a passion, though, rooted in the less 
admirable germs we have named, viz. Hate, Envy, 
Revenge, Jealousy, and the rest. 

This tribal state is evinced in all tribal societies, 
in the Indian of North America, the aborigines of 
Australia, the blacks of Africa, the gregarious 
gangs of South America. The sentiment of the 
TRIBE, the conservative Impulse of kinship Is a 
step in the evolution of higher societies, less rudl- 
mentally or elementally fierce or craven than the 



12 Europe's Handicap — 

individual wild man. Its fiercer aspects may be 
absent in some tribes, rampant in others, exactly 
as men are brave or cowardly, unambitious or 
ambitious, restless or subdued. But the tribal 
psychology is unmistakable. Let us see. It is 
Maine again — surely a safe authority — who writes 
(Early History of Institutions), "There was no 
brotherhood recognized by our savage forefathers 
except actual consanguinity regarded as a fact. 
If a man was not of kin to another there was noth- 
ing between them. He was an enemy to be slain, 
or spoiled, or hated, as much as the wild beasts 
upon which the tribe made war, as belonging in- 
deed to the craftiest and the crudest order of wild 
animals. It would scarcely be too strong an asser- 
tion that the dogs which followed the camp had 
more in common with it than the tribesmen of an 
alien and unrelated tribe." 

The tribal organization is dominant all over the 
ancient world. I mean the world of men before 
the rise of equality under the dispensation of law 
and the enunciation of a society based on merit, 
service, and the prerogatives of endowment. Of 
course there was equality in the TRIBE a coarse 
brutal equalness, unenlightened by any moral 
considerations or any sense of the innate glory of 
manhood, except as that manhood was strong, 
muscular, brave, fearless, and triumphantly effec- 
tive in fighting, which, before the christian or the 
Jewish ideals of the dignity of the more spiritual 
virtues, was well enough. For the most part it 
was the equality of the members of a pack of cattle, 



Tribe and Class 13 

qualified by the emergence of the more vivid emo- 
tions in a being separated from the brute by all the 
wide interval of intelligence and feeling. 

The later stages of political advancement in 
the better circumstanced and endowed tribal com- 
munities of south eastern Europe, gave rise to the 
Grecian communities and the Roman nation. In 
the former we are taught, in the over-perfumed 
language of Edward A. Freeman, to see "the native 
land of art and song and wisdom, and more glori- 
ous still the native land of law and freedom", and 
in the latter a nation that "won the political 
dominion of the world by her arms, and kept her 
hold of it by her abiding Law". But we are not 
told that in both we can ciiscern the ferocity and 
cruelty, the jealousies, the meannesses and lusts, 
the animality in short of the TRIBE. 

Before the invasion of Greece by the Persians 
its innumerable communities — direct heirs of the 
tribal state — , bound by no common tie and 
influenced by the fluctuating pressure of envy or 
interest, were politically segregated into alliances 
that fell apart at the slightest shock, to be arranged 
into new groups, like the color dislocations in a 
kaleidoscope. The republics were cities, with 
some adjoining territory or islands, and the as- 
perity of their mutual jealousies, like that of 
quarrelsome or suspicious neighbors, abetted their 
continual contrivances to advance individual ends 
or circumvent those of others. Except at the 
invasion of Greece by the Persians, and the 
threatened conquest of its liberties by Philip, 



14 Europe's Handicap — 

Grecian public sentiment was seldom engaged in 
any exalted issue. The evanescent surfaces of 
interest, intrigue and superstition, enmity, or 
friendship, alone, at other times, reflected the 
party sympathies of its citizens. 

As to Rome there was gradually separated from 
the first elements of government in Rome, which 
involved the idea of the family and the TRIBE, 
two orders of society, contrasted by their wealth 
and social position. The one a class of rank, 
prestige, and endowment, the Patrician, the other 
a class not technically endued with these marks, 
though its individuals may have acquired opulence 
and fame, the plebeian. The conflict between 
these classes formed the two great parties whose 
incessant contest, recriminations, and alternate 
depredations upon each other make the internal 
history of Rome a long chronicle of social disorder. 
When the Gracchi were over thrown the rage and 
vengeance of the higher orders succeeded, and the 
republic became successively the prey of Marius 
and Sulla, until its confusion and political chaos, 
in which the seeds of individual arrogance, self- 
indulgence, and fanaticism bore fruit in accumu- 
lated crimes, issued in the establishment of the 
monarchy. 

To the north in the vast centres of Europe 
where pullulated the teutonic hordes, later to 
absorb the higher civilizations of the south, the 
tribal facies was maintained in its purity, undis- 
turbed by the sophistications that half or wholly 
concealed the imbedded tribal characteristics of 



Tribe and Class 15 

Greece and Rome. But the history of the teu- 
tonic tribes, of the Grecian city-commonwealths, 
of the Roman nation, expresses, at all times and 
everywhere, the tribal status of warfare, with its 
attendant horrors, with its baser passions, its 
carnage, its racial turpitudes of hate and jealousy, 
of bitterness and aggressions. This is absolutely 
incontrovertible. No enamel of art, no succeda- 
neous professions of freedoms in Grecian societies 
hide the innate bitterness of their reciprocal 
hatreds, nor have they ameliorated the actual 
cruelties of their retaliations; and no high-sound- 
ing ascriptions of merit in their initial formulation 
of Law, saves the Roman Republic from the in- 
criminating accusations of its own historians of 
ruthless slaughters. Human butchery is the san- 
guinary records of all tribal history as we read it 
in that early day, and the monotonous nauseating 
pages of its recital appear circumstantially and con- 
tinuously in the formative and in the later eras of 
those much admired social and political entities — 
Greece and Rome — and no decoration of tech- 
nical analysis as to their contributory influences 
on later civilizations, will hide, for an instant, the 
tribal blood-thirstiness of their vengeances, the 
tribal brutalities of their punishments and tor- 
tures, the tribal excesses of their selfishness and 
arrogance. These cultural growths in civilization 
in southern Europe were infiltrated with barbar- 
ism — tribal barbarism — the tribal barbarism that 
down to this present moment has tinctured the 
history of all Europe with disgrace. 



16 Europe's Handicap — 

And as for the rest of Europe In that early hour 
of its emergence from the dark and hidden past of 
quaternary and post tertiary neolithic and palaeo- 
lithic man, it's history by a calculable likelihood, 
though its accidents and features remain dimly 
seen, or revealed by fits and starts behind the lurid 
curtain of endless conflict, was an interminable 
drama of intertribal discords. 

It would obscure the conclusions of this essay, 
and prove incomparably irksome as well, to 
analyze, in the different nations of Europe, the 
tribal heterogeneity of each. That is surely well 
established as historic fact, and in the survey of the 
present nationalities of Europe, the composite 
structure of the eastern over the western is strik- 
ingly seen. The greater concentration and as- 
similation of parts into a comparatively homoge- 
neous ethnic result, appears in France, Great 
Britain, Belgium, Holland, Sweden, Norway, even 
in Spain and Portugal, and a contrasted complex, 
more obviously dissonant and obstreperously con- 
flicting, in Russia, Austria, Hungary, and in Ger- 
many, though in all of these countries at this 
moment sufficient solidarity is maintained to 
carry on a stupendously desolating war, as 
separate autonomous governments. ' Without go- 
ing further, the titles of the Emperor of Austria in 
the protocols of the Chancellery illustrate, in his 
case the tribal diversity of his subjects. It reads; 
Emperor of Austria, King of Hungary, and of 
Bohemia, of Dalmatia, Croatia and Slavonia, of 
Galicia and Lodomeria,king of Illyria, grand duke 



Tribe and Class 17 

of Austria, of Bukowina, of Styria, Carniola, of 
Carinthia, grand prince of Silesia, margrave of 
Moravia, count of Hapsburg, and the Tyrol. 
And the long lists of names appropriated to de- 
scribe the elements of the various nations, in their 
formative period, shows the nomadic confusion of 
peoples, in the early centuries, crowding on the 
European stage. 

Now what is the Psychosis of the Tribe? The 
Tribe is the lowest condition of human compacts 
in government, or in society. Europe has never 
quite extricated itself from its former tribal dis- 
abilities, even when these latter seem the least 
apparent, as perhaps in England or France. It 
has quite ostentatiously retained them elsewhere, 
where the tribal meanness and lowness, always 
discoverable anywhere throughout Europe, is 
stamped in unmistakable lineaments upon na- 
tional conduct. In what does this tribal lowness 
consist? Probably in four things; the Bigotry of 
Blood, the domineering conviction of superiority; 
the Indulgence of Passion, the unchecked sway 
of rapacity and hate, with the inevitable con- 
comitants of cruelty, heartlesness, and oppression; 
The Rage of Vindictiveness, the animal satisfac- 
tion of Vengeance; the Pride of Fighting, the love 
of combat, which implies probably the noblest 
feature of the tribal state, viz. heroism and devo- 
tion, along with the less admirable implications of 
tyranny, insult, abuse, and boastfulness. Tied up 
with these master moral ions was and Is a variety 
of ignoble feelings which however were less obvious 



18 Europe's Handicap — 

in the primary phases of communal life — the tribe 
proper — than in the later growths of nations and 
commonwealths, and especially in the subsequent 
exasperation of the tribal temperament by the 
establishment of the Class-System. (See Chapter 
II). Here range the contemptible vices, deceit, 
envy, malice, selfishness, felony, mendacity, glut- 
tony, vanity, intolerance, suspicion, deception. 

The earliest tribal character which pervaded the 
innumerable races of Europe, from which its 
modern nations have evolved, and which tribal 
character was softened in some people almost to 
extinction, in others attaining a typical intensity, 
might be almiost described as Parkman has de- 
scribed the character of the North American 
Indian, with a few verbal excisions, whose reten- 
tion would mar its apt relevancy; "Ambition, 
revenge, envy, jealousy, are his ruling passions; 
and his temperament is little exposed to those 
effeminate vices which are the bane of milder 
races. With him revenge is an overpowering 
instinct; nay more, it's a point of honor and a 
duty. His pride sets all language at defiance. 
He loathes the thought of coercion; and few of 
his race have ever stooped to discharge a menial 
office. A wild love of liberty, an utter intolerance 
of control, lie at the basis of his character, and fire 
his whole existence. Yet, in spite of this haughty 
independence, he is a devout hero-worshipper; 
and high achievement in war or policy touches a 
chord to which his nature never fails to respond. 
He looks up with admiring reverence to the sages 



Tribe and Class 19 

and heroes of his tribe; and it Is this principle, 
joined to the respect for age, which springs from 
the patriarchal element in his social system, which, 
beyond all others, contributes union and harmony 
to the erratic members of a tribal community. 
With him the love of glory kindles into a burning 
passion; and to allay its cravings he will dare cold 
and famine, fire, tempest, torture, and death itself." 

It will be impatiently asked why should we dwell 
upon the darkest side of the picture, when the 
fevers de medaille may be lustrous with contrasted 
virtues. Virtue, goodness, excellence, in all its 
forms, is never extinguished, never totally undis- 
cernable anywhere. Heaven knows they have 
abounded in European history, but in the pres- 
ence of the great violation of sanity, now embodied 
in the War of the Twentieth Century, the dark 
side solely remains as the consummate key to the 
intricacies of its antecedents, to the violence of 
its conduct, or to the probable (or possible) harsh- 
ness of its settlements. 

The tribal cultus is the cultus of self. It is 
savagely self-centred and ferociously bombastic. 
Its pugnacity is the instinct of self-preservation in 
part, in part a virile primitiveness of self con- 
sciousness. Altruism is its absolute negation. It 
exults in self-promotion at any and at all costs, and 
in the narrow focus of its perception nothing 
exists but itself. It presents at once the most 
expansive and the most concentrated phase of 
egotism, expansive in its exclusion of all other 
considerations outside of itself, concentrated in 



20 Europe's Handicap — 

the irreducible hardness of its conceit. The con- 
summation of its pride is FORCE, and its esti- 
mate of success is CONQUEST. Qualitatively 
and quantitatively its expression and measure re- 
sponds to the wide diversity of ethnic tempera- 
ment — vitriolic in the Turk, devastating in the 
Hun, murderous, or simply massive, in the Cos- 
sack, Slav, the Croat, idealistic, as of one who 
defends a right, in the Celt, engrossingly arrogant 
in the Anglo-Saxon, impetuous in the Lombard, 
exterminating in the Visigoth, bigoted in the 
Semite, annihilating and enslaving in the Samnite, 
quarrelsome in the Pelasgi. 

The barbarity of tribal exploits is notorious, and 
it has nowhere been more notorious than in 
Europe. Of these the industry of scholarship has 
uncovered the records with incriminating fidelity. 
And Europe has never eradicated its tribal strain 
of sentiment. It indeed became individualized 
and degenerated in ruling houses and dynasties, in 
single titled heads of lands, by the erection and 
maintenance of the Class-System, which dimin- 
ished perhaps the robust fierceness of the tribe — 
welded together in a common weal or common- 
wealth — but which injected into the tribal temper 
the vices of insincerity, deceit, mendacity, subter- 
fuge, persecution, extortion, in a regime where a 
few fed their indulgence at the expense of the 
many, or magnified their importance by the slav- 
ery of multitudes. 

History is irreversible; it is beyond criticism 
and shares this immunity with the solar system, 



Tribe and Class 21 

with the universe of natural laws, because its facts 
are always determined, and the efforts of correc- 
tion take place in an evolution depending on 
vicissitudes and states, which may retard or has- 
ten it, but which remain as facts no matter how 
regarded, involving no praise, no blame, from the 
passionless view of the historian, who finds the 
drama prepared for him by powers resident in 
nature, perhaps referable also to a supervision 
recondite, inscrutable, omniscient and compensa- 
tory. The drama of history is picturesque in pro- 
portion as it is dreadful, and the scribe who relates 
it may have his sympathies, but sees its puppets 
move without a tremor of remonstrance. 

Europe is a phenomenon, its present condition 
a virtual necessity from unescapable precedents. 
Its emergence from its difficulties must be its own 
work, but that work again resides in the larger 
mechanism of the corporate control over them- 
selves in vast masses of men, ostensibly free, per- 
missibly rational. The militarism of Europe is 
the modern survival of the Fighting Spirit of the 
Tribe-cultus and the Class-System of Europe 
connotes a more or less sublimated retention of 
Slavery, also an element in the tribe-cultus. 
Both were absolutely predestinated by the facts 
in the case, and the latter — the Class-System — 
has subjugated, in spots extirpated, the demo- 
cratic strain in the original tribe, for in the tribe 
there was an indulgent and distributed individual 
freedom. 



CHAPTER II 

The System of Class 

The Stages of progressive civilization in the 
tribe quickly starts the rooted pride of our nature 
into active growth, as in primitive habits of mind 
it must. Class distinctions arise. They must, 
and it is inevitable, we might say it is inevitably 
just, that they should be connected with vanity, 
self-glorification, self-promotion, the fluid motives 
of eminence and separate elevation. They are 
the most desirable gratifications to ambition that 
the rude condition of society offers strong or able 
men. And the first rewards of eminence are a 
tribute to merit, to courage. They are the just 
and serviceable compensations of ability and dar- 
ing. They represent the conscious acknowledge- 
ment of the demos for the aristos, the crowd for its 
leader, and doubtless, until such honors became 
hereditary, they have been born with modesty and 
devotion, under the inspiration of a feeling of their 
popular commitment. 

The process of differentiation in sophisticated 
societies, those in which the economic process of 
division of labor has developed, soon establishes, 
as a permanent status, what at first was a fugitive, 
oscillating and individual accident. The principle 
of Heredity is easily recognized, and the claims of 
blood, are readily admitted. A great man must 



Tribe and Class 23 

endow his sons with his own greatness and the 
prerogatives of place, of birth, of connection, soon 
visualize to the masses, in the erection of a class, 
whose functions are immediately involved in the 
superintendence of the civic and politics of the 
community. The rise in importance, in consolida- 
tion, in industry, the advancing conjunction of 
tribes into nations, has, as a historic fact, advanced 
the distinction of class and strengthened them. 
Where communities were small, when they 
remained purely tribal, or where cities rather 
than nations were formed, as in Greece, the ele- 
mental equality among men was better retained, 
was less violently assailed, and delayed that as- 
sumption of prerogative and the exclusiveness of per- 
sonal continuity which increasingly controlled the 
interests of people, when people massed themselves 
together frequently by conquest, oftentimes by 
alliance and fusion, into larger more varied units. 
The simple fact that the tribe by itself, was a 
more or less democratic political organization, 
modified by individual or temporary disturbances, 
advertised its limited territorial control. In the 
tribal state early populations are found to be 
parcelled out in innumerable tribes. They were 
so indeed in Greece, where the tribe had become 
better regulated as a city. They were so in Italy, 
before the Roman event merged and habituated 
to a single government the contiguous cantons, 
and absorbed the Etruscans the Samnites, Mar- 
sians, Volscians, the Sabines, and Rutili. King- 
ship was early recognized both in Greece and Italy, 



24 Europe's Handicap — 

in fact as Freeman writes, ''the King represents 
the national as distinguished from the tribal stage 
of political development. The lowlier chiefs, 
Ealdormen or Dukes were the chiefs of separate 
tribes; as the union of tribes grew into a nation, 
the nation chose a King as the chief of all. They 
chose him perhaps because he was in some sort a 
King already. Some faint signs may be seen in 
our glimpses of the days of our earliest fathers 
which look as if there were kingly houses before 
there was such a thing as kingly government. 
It would seem that the kingly house, the cynecyn, 
the noblest among the noble, the house which most 
truly embodies the whole being of the race, was 
called, when the nation felt the need of a common 
chief, to take its place at the head of all. The 
house which was already kingly in point of descent 
became kingly in point of political power." 

Monarchy was — for the most part — abandoned 
in Greece; the Homeric King — chief — whose 
sceptre passed on from father to son as strictly 
hereditary, was displaced, and the residues of the 
tribal democracy reasserted themselves in a re- 
stricted popular government. At Rome where 
there had also been kings the kingship was abol- 
ished, but a partial resumption may be inferred 
from the establishment of a strong aristocratic 
rulership in the Senate, and the executive officers, 
who carried out its behests, though here again, the 
tribal survival of equality was recognized in the 
later participation of the people in the consulship. 

The exceptional facts of Greece and Rome how- 



Tribe and Class 25 

ever disappeared with the irruption of the Bar- 
barian, and the modern origins of Europe quickly 
present to the student the segregation of society in 
classes, the universal — or almost so — predomi- 
nance of a nobility, whether it was first a nobility 
of office or possession and later became a nobility 
of birth or not. Class Life is coextensive with 
European civilization and the fabled democracies 
of Rome and of Greece were not exempt from its 
recognition. Freeman tells us; "we cannot tell 
what was the origin of the peculiar privileges which 
belonged to an Athenian Eupatrid, to a Roman 
Patrician, or to an English Earl. We may con- 
jecture, we may theorize, we may even infer with a 
high degree of probability, but we cannot dog- 
matically assert. All that we can say is that, in 
the first glimpses which we get of Grecian, Italian, 
and Teutonic history, we see the distinction be- 
tween the noble and the common freeman at least 
as clearly marked as the distinction between the 
common freeman and the classes which were be- 
neath him." Nothing could be more natural; it 
belonged to the tribal and rudimentary relations of 
men before philosophical considerations of a higher 
utility apportioned to men in a free government, 
where the opportunities of individual development 
were unlimited and the admixture of classes com- 
plete, the widest scope of political attainments. 
And that class culture naturally also assimilates 
the idea and practice of Slavery. It was the class 
life and class predilections of the South that 
harbored and insisted upon an actual personal 



26 Europe's Handicap — 

slavery; it is the class conditions of Europe, that 
to-day nourish a real slavery there also, although 
the literal application of the word has no just 
relevancy. It is a slavery conditioned upon the 
abjectness of an idolatry of Title, and the surrender 
of individual opinion to the superior emphasis of 
Caste. It is apparent in the obsequiousness of 
service, the ascription of excellence to position, the 
social idolatry of name, and the influence of 
nominal claims upon public appointments, and 
the exemption of titled estates, of property in land, 
of privileged classes, from just taxation. It is 
also seen in the "reptile press" that fawns on the 
Foreign Office and the Ministers. 

When the barbarian tribes of northern Europe 
accomplished the destruction of the Roman Em- 
pire, and began the laying of the foundation of the 
modern societies, which are its nations to-day, we 
are told (J. T. Abdy) they found "a nation com- 
posed of a privileged class and of an impoverished 
lower class, the middle class no longer existing; 
they found towns governed by heads, and pos- 
sessed of regulations, but pauperized by the exac- 
tions of the imperial city ; they also found a power- 
ful, vigorous, and well trained body of ecclesias- 
tics, into whose hands had fallen the real direction 
of corporate business; moreover they found an 
agricultural population ground down by the exac- 
tions of the proprietors under whom they worked, 
and destitute of any notion of freedom". The 
sweeping proclamation of freedom in Athens and 
its showy but deceptive application was actually 



Tribe and Class 27 

reconciled to a literal slavery, as of the thetes, the 
small proprietors of the country; "they are ex- 
hibited as weighed down by debts and dependence, 
and driven in large numbers out of a state of 
freedom into slavery — the whole mass of them, 
being in debt to the rich, who are proprietors of 
the greater part of the soil", (Grote), nor did the 
change of conditions effeted by Solon, and the later 
revolution, operated by Kleisthenes, extirpate the 
mood and the exercise of oligarchy and class. 

Tribal temper and Class influence have always 
facilitated if they did not demand Slavery. Free- 
man has put it pretty clearly; "slavery has been 
the common law of all times and places till, within 
a few centuries past, it has, among most of the 
nations of the Western Aryan stock, either died 
out or been formally abolished. And we must 
further remember what the earliest form of 
slavery, before slavery has been aggravated by the 
slave trade, really is. The prisoner of war who, 
according to the military code of a rude age, might 
lawfully be put to death — the criminal who has 
forfeited his life to the laws of the state of which he 
is a member — is allowed, whether out of mercy or 
out of covetousness, to exchange death for life in 
bondage. Then the family feeling, so strong in 
setting up one stock steps in no less strongly for 
the pulling down of another, and the man who has 
forfeited his own freedom is held to have forfeited 
the freedom of his children also. Thus arises the 
class of personal slaves, mere chattels either of the 
commonwealth or of an individual master." 



28 Europe's Handicap — 

The vassalage that characterized the course of 
social and civil procedure in Europe, the servile 
relations of the so-called lower classes to the 
domineering and land-owning gentry, the intoler- 
able license of behavior of the privileged — the 
titled — to the untitled, the tyrannies of intimida- 
tion, the actual felonies of forfeiture, the arrogance 
of interference, the natural delusions of superiority 
by birth, are all related to the ingrained accept- 
ance of the slave-idea, against which the revolt of 
freedom — implanted instincts, themselves in Eu- 
rope due to a resumption of the healthier impulses 
of the Tribe — has progressively advanced, but 
which only, through the severing stroke of the 
French Revolution, attained virtual victory. 
This victory has been greatly annulled by — under 
the circumstances — an irrepressible reaction, 
which served the purpose of reviving the Tribe and 
the Class, and all they imply, — all a matter of 
common history — so that to-day their extirpation 
rests solely in some sort of universal demolition, 
and social deracination. 

It is most certain that the class systems of Eu- 
rope are immemorial in their origins, that they 
represent obsolete phases of tribal government, 
that everything about them is stamped with the 
ineffaceable mark of antiquity, that it would be 
almost impossible to ascend any where the current 
of legible history where we do not constantly en- 
counter class distinctions, as the inevitable and 
necessary impositions of rank in times, primordial, 
nepionic, and dissolute — dissolute, observe, in the 



Tribe and Class 29 

sense of partially formless or wholly juvenile. At 
no time was the institutions of class more likely to 
arise than at the disastrous moment when the 
regulated and structurally imposing dominion of 
Rome fell to pieces, and the swarming teutonic 
tribes overwhelmed and submerged it. 

The slow subsidence of the ethnic invasion per- 
mitted roman institutes to reappear, roman offices 
to continue, and the impregnable efficacy of roman 
law to influence jurisdiction and common law. 
With the slow growth of new domains of govern- 
ment out of the vast colossus of the roman em.pire, 
under the conditions of confusion, of conflict that 
supervened with its dismemberment, the feudal 
System and the Monarchy became established, 
and both in a measure, the latter profoundly, won 
a deeper permanence from the sanctification of the 
Church. "The King's commission was divine, 
because it was bestowed with ecclesiastical rites by 
the highest ministers of the Church within the 
kingdom" (Freeman). And In a still further pro- 
cess of perpetuation the same author writes, "it 
was by a later change again that the King gradu- 
ally changed from the chief of the people into the 
lord of the land, that the notion of office began 
again to be lost in the notion of possession, and 
that the kingdom began to be looked on as a 
personal estate, which must, like any other estate, 
pass on from father to son, according to some rule 
of hereditary succession laid down beforehand." 
An idea so imbedded in Its genesis with the entire 
historic consciousness of nations has, with slow- 



30 Europe's Handicap — 

ness and opposition and with reactionary bitter- 
ness of feeling only been dislodged. Its moral 
effectiveness in Europe to-day is unmistakable. 
It belongs to the Tribe-Cultus and the Class- 
System, and it is an anachronism. Its influence on 
national sentiment is at all times prolonged and 
definite, even when the office itself has been re- 
duced in its functions and practical efficiency, to 
almost nothing, as in England. It extends the 
Tribal feeling, and it justifies the Class-System. 
Neither of these is reconcilable with true democ- 
racy — the democracy of soul and mind as well as 
of form — and both continue the practice of war- 
fare and the policy of depredation. 

The Feudal System lies at the root of the modern 
European Class System, and in it we discover too 
a sort of extension of a titled officialdom in the Ro- 
man Empire, for Gibbon tells us, ''the titles, 
counts and dukes, have obtained in modern 
languages so very different a sense from their 
Roman form, that their use may occasion some 
surprise. But it should be recollected that the 
second of these appellations is only a corruption of 
the Latin word, which was indiscriminately applied 
to any military chief. All these provincial 
generals were therefore dukes: but no more than 
ten among them were dignified with the rank of 
count or companion — a title of honor or rather 
favor, which had been recently invented in the 
court of Constantine. A gold belt was the ensign 
which distinguished the office of the counts and 
dukes, and, besides their pay, they received a 



Tribe and Class 31 

liberal allowance, sufficient to maintain one hun- 
dred and ninety servants and one hundred and 
fifty-eight horses." 

Feudalism was the climax of the confused, de- 
fenceless, and scattered condition of the popula- 
tions of Europe, when the weak became the prey of 
the strong, and the man of arms rose, by the most 
natural legitimacy of position, to be the master of 
the man without arms, or, under considerations 
more or less legally formulated, became the 
latter's protector. Land rights and territorial 
possession accrued to the powerful, beginning at 
the King at the top, and the successive Class- 
despots beneath him, or to express it more deliber- 
ately, with the dispassionate'accent of scholarship, 
the Feudal System, says Hallam, ''was the general 
establishment of a peculiar relation between the 
sovereign (not as king, but as lord — ) and his im- 
mediate vassals, between these again and others 
standing to them in the same relation of vassalage, 
and thus frequently through several links in the 
chain of tenancy". 

All of which meant many things, which the 
portentous research of an army of scholars has re- 
duced to a vast terminology of public and personal 
relations between the varying degrees of the sub- 
jection of the vassal, and the varying degrees of 
the dominion of the lord. But it meant one thing 
very clearly, very forcibly, the erection into an 
organic feature of government of the distinction of 
class, which distinction crystallizing into fixity, 
by the force of habit, impressed itself on the mind 



32 Europe's Handicap — 

as essential and the Noble in rank was the noble 
in character, and in attainments. 

And those claiming nobility interpreted their 
rights without much deference to reason or justice, 
and not seldom without the ameliorating exhibition 
of mercy or sympathy. The Class idea grew upon 
a substratum of fealty, as to a defender, in those 
who were not noble, upon a substratum of in- 
feriority, as of a servant, also, and the roots of this 
double meaning, so inserted themselves in the 
mentality of the masses that nothing about it 
seemed unnatural, seemed obnoxious. Enlighten- 
ment changed much, but the concrete extinction 
of the conception accompanied a violence so ex- 
travagant, that by the perennial force of reaction, 
the old relation of noble and commoner was re- 
sumed, after the Revolution; and, while very 
differently displayed, kept its intractable hold on 
the imagination of the people, and yet, in Europe, 
subjects them to the vagaries of individual 
initiative, to the pow-wow of ministerial cabinets, 
the chamber or window conferences of diplomats, 
the intrigues of rules, the philosophical or theo- 
retical excursions of essayists. 

The Tribal Status remains to-day in Europe and 
shows itself in the insubordination of racial preju- 
dice, the Class Status abides there also, and is seen 
of course most conspicuously in the actual use and 
inheritance of Title, and is more latently influen- 
tial and subversive of temperamental equality, at 
least, in the suppliancy of fashion to mere verbal 
degree, in the restraints of intercourse and at many 
points in the flummeries of fashion. 



Tribe and Class 33 

TRIBE and CLASS have accomplished great 
things, and under the coercion of a wonderfully 
interesting retinue of events — whose occasion or 
reasonableness of meaning no one knows anything 
about that, resting, as we say, "in the lap of the 
gods" — has evolved the present Europe, has filled 
the pages of history with the recital of marvellous 
achievements, enriched literature and science with 
libraries and discoveries of beauty and utility, 
produced the masterpieces of art, and set up the 
images of great men before the reverential gaze of 
all. But if such results, mediately or immediately, 
are to be ascribed to them, also in the reckoning, 
must be thrown in, their pernicious incitation to 
warfare, plunder, oppressio^ii, slavery, extortion, 
their persistent opposition to improvement, their 
intrinsic alliance with the baser and meaner pro- 
clivities of human nature, and their recalcitrance 
under correction, their blindness before instruction. 

History admits of no philosophy; it simply IS. 
Perhaps in the past men have not made their own 
history; it has been made for them, and they have 
undergone a necessary training. In the future, 
history must be what they wish it to be, and to-day 
UTILITY dominates device, and the Benthamite 
axiom of the Greatest happiness for the Greatest num- 
ber forms the controlling clue to the mystery of 
living. If in the past history has been the mutual 
interaction of Tribe and Class — regarding Europe 
only — in the future, both must be abolished. 
DEMOCRACY may mean the subjugation of the 
individual, and a lessening of histrionic interest, 
but it means also PEACE. 



CHAPTER III 
The Confusion of Tribes 

Without regarding the tribal commixtures that 
prevailed in Greece and Italy in the earliest 
glimpses we get of these countries, and which com- 
mixture had been clarified and settled by the for- 
mation of the grecian commonwealths, and more 
definitely disposed of by the absorption of all of 
southern Europe by the aggressive Roman Re- 
public, consider the chaotic tides of racial move- 
ment in middle and eastern and western Europe — 
more quiescent in the west than in the east — from 
whose final overflow, everywhere, modern Europe 
was to arise. The great germanic hordes were 
pressing upon their Celtic and gaulic predecessors 
in the west, who had already displaced an Iberian 
population, which in its time and turn had im- 
pinged upon some hypothetical mongolian pre- 
cursors, now forced out of sight towards the north, 
in Finland and Lapland. 

Back of the Teuton was the Huns, and the 
Avars, and the Slavs, and laggardly, but still 
intrusively, the Tartar, or what that stands for, 
and in all of these consanguineous or opposed 
masses and stocks, from the Celt to the Tartar, 
was an assemblage of lesser communities — 
TRIBES — that contributed to the confusion of 
parts, while an uncontrolled instinct of movement 



Tribe and Class 35 

brought each and all into incessant collisions, and 
inured them to warfare, as well as to subjugation 
and slavery. It was vortex within vortex, as of a 
tide whirled into eddies by its own motions. It 
was a slow or rapid transgression of an ethnic 
flood, that poured out torrents and volumes 
of diverse peoples, entering the settlements of 
Roman life, and engulfing the sporadic communi- 
ties of pre-existent aboriginal life. It was at- 
tended with disturbance, with conflict, mounting 
climaxes of confusion, as upon the inrush of un- 
appeasable conquerors like Attila and Alaric, the 
earlier sustained resistance against Rome of 
invaded patriots, like Vercingetorix against Julius 
Caesar, the refluent energy of repulse, as when the 
Franks held back their Germanic brethren beyond 
the Rhine, or when, after unmitigated slaughter, 
the Germans forced the Huns to retire to the 
shores of the Black Sea. 

Roman aggression had also contributed to the 
dislocation of tribes, and the conquest of Gaul, the 
annexation of Spain, the encroachments upon the 
teutonic wildernesses north of Rome, were con- 
tributory shocks whose vibrations were felt far 
and near, and which stirred the blood of the bar- 
barian, whose cupidity and his awakening realiza- 
tion of the splendors of the Roman world aroused 
in him motives of curiosity and pleasure. 

To make the picture more enthralling, more 
convincing, the reader — in whose mind must be 
slowly penetrating the concept of the basic bar- 
barism of Europe — is invited to follow up to the 



36 Europe's Handicap — 

formal or symptomatic birth of the nations of 
Europe, their tribal antecedents. Let him begin 
— after Rome had slowly herself integrated the 
Eugani, the Albanians, the Fidenae, the Volscians, 
the Sabines, the Veientes, the Aequi, the Faliscae, 
the Volsinians, the Salpinati, the Etruscans, the 
Hernici, the Samnites, the Latins, the Privernates, 
the Lucanians, the Apulians, the Tusculani, the 
Ansones, the Umbrians, the Sallnetini — let him 
begin with the first centuries of our era, or rela- 
tively so, and, starting in his bird's eye and 
cameroscopic review, follow the tribal mutations 
of kin and sort from Spain through France, to the 
titanic tribal pulsations of the east, those that had 
for their stage the plains of Poland, and Hungary, 
the banks of the Danube, Dniester, Vistula, the 
mountains of Carpathia, the forests of Bavaria and 
Saxony, and the valley of the Rhine, and from this 
seething and tumultuous confusion of Europe's 
future material, or stuff for national life, draw his 
own conclusions as to the probability that even 
under the guise of fixed government, regulated by 
law, honored by practice, and enriched by talent, 
the overwhelming potency of heredity will not 
insert in it the temper and the constitution of its 
past progenitors. 

For Europe was simply tribal for centuries, and 
remains — in a residual and variously qualified 
way — tribal to-day. The brawling pugnacity of 
gens and septs, the snarling racial prejudices, the 
vehement provincial egoisms, the embittering taint 
of feud, the vindictive passions of reprisal, brutal 



Tribe and Class 37 

destructiveness, the arrogance of domination in 
conquest and often the complicity of sycophancy 
and treachery are still there. This vulgarity of 
disposition is the legacy of history and there is no 
escape from it except by a changed environment 
or by the utter abandonment of tribal and class 
systems. The tribal and the class systems are not 
quite absent with us. They exist by reason of the 
imported habits of Europe, by reason of the human 
recurrence to the tribal nature, from which we 
have all emerged, and perhaps in a way by reason 
of the insipidity of feeling in certain classes — quite 
generally the bourgeois, and the feeble-minded 
rich — who adore the gloss of superficial refinement, 
and the sentiment of antiquity. 

But — we have forgotten our task. 

Turning then to Spain; Rome had conquered 
it, for Numantia had been destroyed, and its 
defence was itself a signal tribute to the ardor of 
the tribal temper — the Tribal Estate boasts its 
magnificent virtues too — as it and its inhabitants 
fell in self-ignited flames, and Numantia was the 
last stronghold of resistance to Rome. And after 
Rome came the Vandal and the Visigoth. It was 
the Suevi, the Alani and the Vandals first, and 
then the Goths. Almost endless struggles marked 
the fall of the first barbarians, and the later union 
of the Goth and the Iberian reestablished a king- 
dom of strength and a rude nobility. The tribal 
temperament of immitagable pugnacity was here 
so marked that as Washington Irving writes 
''when they had no external foes to contend with. 



38 Europe's Handicap — 

they fought with one another; and when engaged 
in battle, says an old chronicler, the very thunders 
and lightnings of heaven could not separate them." 

Afterwards followed that conquest of Spain by 
the Moor which has been embroidered with so 
many lustrous and quaint legends, and which, in 
literature, through the magic of the American 
Irving, seems to sparkle with the iridescent hues 
of fable, truth, and romance. And the subjuga- 
tion of christian Spain by the infidels under 
Taric el Tuerto, as given in the legend, expanded 
with lucid charm by Irving, reveals perhaps in the 
Moor a refreshing suppression of those tribal 
traits which in Europe has made victory abhorrent. 

The ravages of the Vandals, before the Goths 
came, had been indescribable in their horrors of 
pillage, massacre, and conflagration. Spain, like 
a wounded prey on the field of hunting, was 
severed into parts, between the rapacious clans of 
the Vandals, the Alans, and the Suevi. Then 
entered upon the distracted country the Goths 
under Ataulphus to be succeeded by a mercenary 
and sanguinary murderer Sigeric, while in the 
midst of internecine warfare, darkened by turpi- 
tude and infidelity, the Vandals slowly were ex- 
pelled, their retreating steps fatefully distin- 
guished by the abomination of robbery, bloodshed, 
and infamy. 

The contest for possession was continued be- 
tween the Goths and the Suevi, while again by a 
sudden coalition between Franks, Romans, and 
Goths, Theodoric a gothic king led the combined 



Tribe and Class 39 

hosts against a new terror, the ruthless and de- 
molishing Attila. Relieved of this dark menace 
the battling tribes resumed their unquenchable 
hatreds, and "Goths and Romans and Suevi 
traversed Spain in every direction, and everywhere 
left melancholy vestiges of their barbarous fury". 

The annals of the Gothic ascendency before their 
overthrow by the Moors is a strange tapestry of 
savagery, religion, vice, heroism, treason, insur- 
rections, intestinal turbulence; perpetual dis- 
putes, with intervals of specious peace, and the 
fabled presence of prosperity. 

That militarism which is to-day, in Europe's 
tribal state, a virtual necessity, has always been a 
necessity, and under the Vi^goths of Spain was a 
relentlessly imposed duty. Mr. G. Mercer Adams 
thus describes it; "all Goths capable of bearing 
arms, whether lay or clerical, were subject to 
military duty; and heavy were the penalties with 
which he was visited who absented or hid himself 
to escape the conscription; if he were a noble fill- 
ing some high employment, he was deposed and 
banished; if a common noble, he was beaten and 
branded; the officer who for a bribe excused any- 
one from the service was compelled to pay four 
times the amount of the money he had received, 
besides a heavy fine to the king. The captain who 
forsook his post in time of war was beheaded; or, 
if he took sanctuary to a church, he was fined in 
six hundred crowns, to be divided among the 
soldiers of his company." 

In Gaul tribal quarrels introduced the Roman 



40 Europe's Handicap — 

mastery though the Roman hand had long before 
been laid upon it, and when the bickering Aedui 
and Sequani were suddenly confronted with an 
invasion of the Helvetians, who had with stubborn 
grim cynicism burned their towns, and ruined their 
fields, so that no repentant regrets might tempt 
them to return, they summoned Julius Caesar to 
their rescue. The Roman legions delivered them 
from this initial peril, and with an equal facility 
later saved them a second time from the over- 
bearing Ariovistus and his german hosts, whom 
the Sequani had invited to assist them in their 
fratricidal altercations and then too late realized 
the moral of an ancient fable; 

Garde-toi, tant que tu vivras, 
De juger les gens sur la mine. 

With the assumption of power by the Romans 
the Belgians were called in to rescue the astonished 
Gauls, and the omnipotent Caesar crushed the 
confederates, annihilated the Nervii, and through 
his lieutenant enslaved Armorica. The tribal 
fierceness irrepressibly rose to the new ordeal, and 
the Veneti, followed by the tribes of Armorica, 
started a new revolt. Caesar overcame the rising, 
and obliterating 400,000 Usipetes at the confluence 
of the Rhine and the Meuse, invaded Britain, and 
imposed his irresistible power upon its inhabitants 
also. But the quenchless fires of rebellion awoke 
again, and the Gaulish tribes uniting, with the 
sharp unanimity of consent that distinguish tribal 



Tribe and Class 41 

impulses, under Indutiomarus of the Treviri, and 
Ambiorix of the Eburones withstood the Romans, 
with the help of the tribes north of Cambresis and 
Hainault. The resourceful and quick-minded 
Caesar turned up in time, and relieved his besieged 
legionaries and again extinguished the fires of 
rebellion, striking right and left with an extermi- 
nating fury. Once more the resurgent forces of 
despair massed the Gauls against the indestructi- 
ble legions and the young hero Vercingetorix of 
the Auvergnats marched at the head of an undis- 
ciplined host against the Roman armies in Bel- 
gium. In the tribal style, massacres marked their 
advance, but Caesar, like a scourge, with fire and 
sword, was swiftly hastening through Arvernia to 
the rescue. Gergovia received the conquering 
Vercingetorix and here the last phases of the 
hideous duel were enacted. Rome was driven to 
bay, and the illustrious Caesar saved by the Tenth 
Legion withdrew; intercepted, victory perched 
again upon the standards of the Eagles, 

Unde nil majus generatur ipso, 

Nee viget quidquam simile aut secundum, 

and the discomfited and baffled Vercingetorix 
fortified himself behind the walls of Alesia. 

In the sight of two hundred thousand Gauls who 
had hastened to the succor of their compatriots 
Caesar helped by the Germans completed the cap- 
ture of the city, and the utter rout and slaughter 
of the Gauls who had rushed to its deliverance. 



42 Europe's Handicap — 

Gaul became roman, and its wonderful pacificator 
passed on as one who 

gets the start of the majestic world 
and bears the palm alone. 

Under the roman rule the land of the Gauls 
suffered still from the impetuous and swarming 
efforts of the Germans to enter it, and when at 
last the expiring control of the Empire left the 
country more and more exposed to these violent 
incursions, and when Tetricus the last of the Gallic 
Caesars surrendered himself to the Emperor 
Aurelian, the Germanic tribes invaded and 
ravaged it. Then we are told (Bonnechose) ; 
"Devastated by barbarians, crushed with taxes 
imposed by the various candidates to empire, and 
exhausted of men and money, the country at 
length fell into the most miserable condition. So 
great was its desolation, that freemen frequently 
made themselves serfs or slaves, in order to escape 
the obligation of bearing a share of the public 
burdens." 

Constantly, amid this confusion, demoraliza- 
tion, and incertude, the recurrent waves of the 
Germanic migration beat against the eastern 
borders, and thus ensued the mingled terrors of 
war and desolation, until for a few years peace was 
won by a sweeping victory of Julian, the cousin of 
Constantine, at Argentoratum (Strasburg), and 
the Salian Franks were for the instant repulsed, 
leaving behind the most fearful memories, for these 
barbarians had ravaged forty of the most advanced 



Tribe and Class 43 

cities of Gaul, Treves, Cologne, Mayence, Worms, 
Spires, and Strasburg itself. And the barbarian 
was everywhere; it was they in the armies of 
Rome, whose endurance, against the repeated in- 
vasions only secured temporary respite from moles- 
tation, it was they who tampered with the 
administration of its affairs and who fed the zeal 
of its missionaries with converts, who perpetually 
confiscated its property to their own purposes, 
vitiated its laws, and dishonored its prestige. 

It was after the fall of Constantine — a daring 
adventurer who had been elected by the Roman 
legions in Britain, and who had allied with him- 
self the Burgundians and Franks, and had gained 
possession of the greater part of Gaul — it was upon 
his fall that anarchy spread the darkest terrors of 
tribal rivalry and collision throughout the land 
that was to shape itself finally into France. 

To the south were the Visigoths extending their 
sway beyond the Pyrenees into Spain, and whose 
capital was Toulouse; to the east the Burgundians 
in Alsace, with territorial sovereignty reaching 
from the Lake of Geneva as far north as Coblenz 
on the Rhine; in the north and west the Franks, 
who had emerged from the areas of the Rhine, the 
Scheldt, and the Ardennes mountains, who had by 
successive encroachments occupied Belgium, and 
stretched their skirts to the banks of the Somme 
Illustrative of that tribal heterogeneity we have so 
much alluded to, the Franks were not a single na- 
tion but a confederation of related tribes, among 
whom the historians enumerate the Salii, the 



44 Europe's Handicap — 

Ripuarii, the Sicambri, the Bructeri, and the 
Chamavi. 

But the inveterate strife, gathering from every 
circumstance of rapacity, or hatred, or deceit, 
fresh miseries, still went on, and the general Aetius 
with a barbarian army retained a disputed al- 
legiance to the disappearing genius of Rome, when 
that horrific inundation of the Huns under Attila, 
which threatened Spain also, swept out from that 
fecund East, whose tribal emissions like the pulsa- 
tions of a storm — tossed reservoir against its 
broken dams, with periodic violence carried new 
floods of population westward. Attila enters on 
the scene with five hundred thousand followers, all 
animated with the reckless madness of their chief, 
and marked his triumphal path with the atrocities 
of the despot, the savage, and the braggart. He 
was overthrown at Chalons-sur-Marne and 
moodily retreated and then, over the crumbling 
ruins of the Roman suzerainty, rose the power of 
the Salian Franks, and Clovis, a barbarian of the 
barbarians, ruthless, ungrateful, ferocious, schem- 
ing, credulous, as Watson has written it, ''by a 
dramatic career of force and fraud, daring and 
craft, perfidy and crime, crushed all rivals in 
France, and welded its widely different elements 
into a great kingdom." 

The Celt had succumbed to the Teuton and the 
latter became the nobility of the new kingdom, the 
ruling and privileged Class, and, under the weight 
of accumulated degradation and servitude, the 
tribal animosity of the Celt gathered bitterness 



Tribe and Class 45 

with the rolling years, each one marked with new 
accesses of disdain and suffering. For, under the 
relations and reciprocations of Class Systems, the 
Tribal intensity of hatred, as between race and 
race, grow more deeply sinister. True Democracy 
alone assuages and reconciles Tribal enmities, and 
the historians have not been averse to see in the 
desecrating excesses of the French Revolution, the 
recrudescence of that early tribal revulsion, which 
the iniquities of the Class life of twelve hundred 
years had rendered ineffaceable, as between the 
Goth and the Celt. To dwell upon the full 
significance of these deductions here would be 
premature. Let us continue our suggestive — and 
suggestive only — review of the tribal foundationsof 
the European States. 

Turning to the Lowlands, the future Holland, 
whose tribal condition was so closely connected, 
and for a long time intrinsically identical with the 
Belgium provinces at its southern margins, we 
find a less confusing and disastrously complex 
tribal expression, but yet one which in its history 
revealed the same elements of daring, carnage, re- 
sistance, submission, and final subjugation by an 
inexorable conqueror. There were here two 
contrasted races, the Belgae, gaulic or Celtic in 
their affinities, and provenance, the Batavians or 
Frisians, germanic, and allied to the teutonic 
stock. Both were brave, hardy, of towering 
physiques and intrepid endurance, but the Ba- 
tavians, according to Tacitus were the bravest of 
all the Germans. 



46 Europe's Handicap — 

''The Chatti (Suavi?) of whom they formed a 
portion were a preeminently warlike race. 'Others 
go to battle,' says the historian, 'these go to war.' 
Their bodies were more hardy, their minds more 
vigorous, than those of other tribes. Their 
young men cut neither hair nor beard till they had 
slain an enemy. On the field of battle, in the 
midst of carnage and plunder, they, for the first 
time, bared their faces. The cowardly and 
sluggish, only, remained unshorn. They wore an 
iron ring, too, or shackle upon their neck, until 
they had performed the same achievement, a 
symbol which they then threw away, as the 
emblem of sloth." (Motley). 

It was Celtic Gaul that first rose against the 
legions of Rome, "inflammable, quick to strike, 
but too fickle to prevail against so powerful a foe, 
they hastily form a league of almost every clan", 
(Motley), but, rushing into the gap their disarray, 
retreat, and capitulation had made, the Nervii, 
their tribal colleagues — denizens of the black and 
sullen woods, the watered plains, the cold morasses 
— withstand and confuse the enemy; "they fought 
upon that day till the ground was heaped with 
their dead, while, as the foremost fell thick and 
fast, their comrades, says the Roman, sprang upon 
their piled-up bodies, and hurled their javelins at 
the enemy as from a hill. They fought like men 
to whom life without liberty was a curse. They 
were not defeated but exterminated." 

From their tragic annihilation Caesar turned to 
the easier task of pacifying the Aduatici, the 



Tribe and Class 47 

Menapii, and the Morini. Later Claudius CIvilis, 
a Batavian, united the tribal strength of the low 
countries, (the Nether-Lands), in a desperate 
struggle for the expulsion of the foreign foe. This 
extraordinary effort was the brief and noble ex- 
postulation of the tribal pride against conquest, 
and, from a more philosophical point of view, also, 
was a proof of the ineradicable tribal individual- 
ism, that narrowly, doggedly, almost malignantly 
rejects fusion, and social amalgamation. Personal 
obliteration is the keenest disappointment to the 
savage freeman; it is his disgrace. CIvilis failed, 
his name disappears. 

In the swaying fortunes of Rome, before or 
beneath the onsets of her tireless, her inexhaustible 
foes, the Netherlands are "successively or simul- 
taneously trampled by Franks, Vandals, Alani, 
Suevi, Saxons, Frisians, and even Sclavonians, as 
the great march of Germany to universal empire, 
which her prophets and bards had foretold, went 
majestically forward." (Motley). 

The tribal picture of Europe in those first 
centuries of the Christian day, becomes more 
crowded with figures, more tumultuous with 
movement, more sanguinary in conflict, more in- 
explicable in origins, more rapid in changes, more 
dissonant in dialects, as we attempt to penetrate 
the thickening swarms of peoples who covered or 
moved over the face of ancient Germany, or with 
bewildered foot-steps we thread the maze of 
peoples beyond them, the Slavonians of Bohemia, 
Silesia, Poland, Galicia, Russia, Servia, Croatia, 



48 Europe's Handicap — 

Carniola, Hungary, Prussia, Bulgaria, or, in tote, 
as Dr. Latham interpreted them sixty years ago, 
the Sarmatians, composed of Slavonic and lithuanic 
stocks. 

Long before the events hurriedly compacted 
together in these generalized indications, had 
transpired, the insistent barbarians (gauls) had 
penetrated from the north, in broken and occa- 
sional invasions, into Greece and Rome. In the 
time of Pyrrhus they had entered through 
Macedonia into Greece, as far as Delphi (Nie- 
buhr). These early incursions were symptomatic 
of the presence of restless and agitated populations 
of wild men in the north, whose number increased, 
and whose internal disquietudes, as of caged 
animals, kept constantly breaking through the 
boundaries of their imprisonment, to glimpse the 
cultivated gardens and blooms, they were denied. 
These gauls in some refluent current were sweeping 
back to Asia and twenty thousand of them crossed 
over into Asia, where they became a scourge from 
their tribal ferocity, and the mercenary prostitu- 
tion of their services until Attalus of Pergamus 
reduced them. 

These outbreaks did not spare Rome and the 
Eternal City in one of the most dramatic episodes 
of history became the prey of the northern savage. 
Every school-boy recalls the picturesque dilemma 
of the Roman Senate, sitting in ostentatious 
gravity, (Livy, Lib.V, Cap IV), arrayed in their 
august robes of office, awaiting the arrival of the 
advancing Gauls, now, as they entered the city. 



Tribe and Class 49 

thunder-struck and suspicious of an ambuscade, at 
the death-like silence of the streets of the deserted 
city. The theatrical contrast is effectually spec- 
tacular. The barbarians penetrate the reserved 
precincts of the Senate, and gaze incredulously 
upon the stiff figures of the Senators, imposingly 
severe in their vestments, with lineaments fixed 
in the unnatural serenity of anticipated violence, 
and, thus assembled, resembling some congress of 
the gods, — and very dumb gods too. The acute 
suspense is broken, when an inquiring Gaul, 
stroking the descending beard of a patrician sen- 
ator — is struck on the head with his ivory staff, 
for the insolent familiarity. In a flash the 
slaughter begins, as the ruffians cut down the 
ancient worthies, motionless and unresisting, in 
their chairs. 

Then succeeds a free-booting excursion through 
the city, with all of the sanguinary and destructive 
accompaniments of savage exultation in ravage 
and mutilation and murder. — Post principum 
caedem nulli deinde mortalium parciy diripi tecta, 
exhaustis injici ignes. 

Intermittent depredations and injections from 
the northern incunabula are registered from time 
to time after this, but with no signal efficacy of 
incident. The barbarians are sometimes repulsed 
altogether, sometimes appropriated and digested, 
with that political aptitude of assimilation, that 
was the faculty of the Republic, and which de- 
rived its efficiency from a rude realization, and an 
imperfect practice, of equality, itself but a simu- 



50 Europe's Handicap — 

lacrum and caricature of the democratic skill, with 
which these States cement and fuse their diverse 
social, moral, mental, and racial elements into a 
unit. 

In the year 113 B. C. a horde of the Germans of 
the North forced their way southward over the 
Alps of Tyrol and, crowding into Italy, with their 
households to the number of several hundred 
thousand met the consul Papirius Carbo and de- 
feated him in a great battle between the Adriatic 
and the Alps. The combined mass of Cimbrians 
and Teutons then heavily moved westward, and 
invaded Gaul, and, like some monstrous plague, 
ravished the countries they crossed. They 
reached Spain, but with the desultory indecision of 
savages returned, and were about to re-enter 
Italy, when the successful Marius met them, and 
first exterminated two hundred thousand Teutons 
at Aix, and afterwards, as a corroboration of his 
thoroughness, slew all of the Cimbrians at Vercelli. 

From this time the collisions of the Romans and 
the surging and unquiet denizens of the central 
mountains, forests, and valleys of Europe, in- 
creased in frequency, and the incessant conflict 
successively brought tribe after tribe, and groups 
of tribes under various leaders, against the generals 
and emperors of Rome, presenting along all the 
borders of the republic an exciting panorama of 
war, relieved by the momentary flashes of military 
genius, the splendor of individual germanic 
patriots, and darkened into the inkiest nightmares 
of cruelty, perfidy, and abominable carnage, by 



Tribe and Class 51 

the unpitled sufferings of thousands, the un- 
counted dead, the overthrow of cities, the shame- 
less assassination of individuals, the towering ele- 
vation, as of some awful exaggeration of human 
wickedness, of an Alaric, or an Attila, or a Geiseric, 
the whole also interwoven, as with a mesh of 
disease, with the meanest motives of jealousy, and 
revenge, envy, and covetousness. 

And an overpowering influence in the diversified 
agitation, so far as the migratory restlessness of the 
peoples are concerned, was that pressure of the 
military masses of Asia. The words of Motley 
most ornately revealed it. 

"Obscure but importan^t movements in the 
regions of eternal twilight, revolutions of which 
history has been silent, in the mysterious depths of 
Asia, outpourings of human rivers along the sides 
of the Altai Mountains, convulsions up-heaving 
remote realms and unknown dynasties, shock after 
shock throbbing throughout the barbarian world, 
and dying upon the edge of civilization, vast throes 
which shake the earth, as precursory pangs to the 
birth of a new empire — as dying symptoms of the 
proud but effete realm which called itself the 
world; scattered hordes of sanguinary, grotesque 
savages pushed from their own homes, and hover- 
ing with vague purposes upon the Roman frontier, 
constantly repelled and perpetually reappearing 
in ever increasing swarms, guided thither by a 
fierce instinct, or by mysterious laws, — such are 
the well-known phenomena which preceded the 
fall of Western Rome." 



52 Europe's Handicap — 

The tribal picture or tableau needs a further 
more explicit display, and we follow the excellent 
resumption of the matter in Bayard Taylor's 
history, as revised and modernized by Prof. 
Sidney B. Fay, quoting his broad designation of 
the germanic occupation; "the territory which 
they occupied was almost the same as that which 
now belongs to the German Empire. The Rhine 
divided them from the Gauls, except towards its 
mouth, where the Germanic tribes occupied part 
of Belgium. A line drawn from the Vistula south- 
ward to the Danube nearly represents their eastern 
boundary, while up to this time, they do not 
appear to have crossed the Danube on the south. 
The district between that river and the Alps, now 
Bavaria and Styria, was occupied by Celtic tribes. 
Northward they had made some advance into 
Sweden, and probably also into Norway. They 
thus occupied nearly all of central Europe north 
of the Alpine chain." 

Westphalia of to-day was inhabited by the 
Sicambrians; toward the Harz, the Marsi and 
Ampsivarii, and south of these the Ubii. From 
the Weser to the Elbe north was the Cherusci, 
south of them the Chatti, and along the head- 
waters of the river Main the Marcomanni, a very 
notable section of the family. Saxony was 
partially possessed by the Hermunduri — also 
called Suevi — and around the mouth of the Elbe 
dwelt the Longobardi; in Holstein the Saxons, in 
Schleswig, the Angles. East of the Elbe were the 
Semnones guarding a sacred district devoted by 



Tribe and Class 53 

many tribes to religious rites not unaccompanied 
by the sacrifice of human victims. North of the 
Semnones dwelt the Vandals, and along the Baltic 
the Rugii; then between these latter and the 
Vistula river were the Burgundians, and where the 
city of Konigsberg now stands was the focus of the 
Goths, and south of them again the Sarmatians 
(Slavs). 

Bohemia was first settled by the Boii, a Celtic 
tribe, and beyond the Danube all was Celtic, with 
the Vindelici in Bavaria, the Noric and Rhaetian 
Celts in the Tyrolese Alps, and the Helvetii in 
Switzerland. 

We are not here concerned w4th describing their 
tribal constitution or indeed those hypothetical 
virtues and rude colorations of manner and cus- 
toms, their dress, their weapons, the paraphernalia 
of their culture, and the severe and homely attri- 
butes of their domestic life, their religion, or their 
vices. This thesis maintains that Europe now, 
this hour, is afflicted with the tribal instinct, the 
tribal nature, the tribal divisional repulsions, and 
what that implies is discerned most clearly in its 
effects or incitations as they are read in black and 
white on the pages of history. That history is in- 
deed most ineffectually presented here, and, but 
hinted at, but for the qualitative analysis of the 
tribal (also conjoined here with the vicious inter- 
action of the Class System) nature, we believe it is 
adequate — as we shall see — to establish the indict- 
ment of European civilization, not of course in its 
technique, but in its spirit. Nor is that quite all. 



54 Europe's Handicap — 

The tribal instinct, the tribal nature has, under 
the vicissitudes of history, been exacerbated or 
degenerated, by these same vicissitudes, under the 
cruelty of conquerors, the selfishness of rulers, the 
brutality of regimes, the bigotry of religions, the 
meannesses of living, the squalor of sentiment. 
Nor should we be further misunderstood, by hav- 
ing attributed to us the utter blankness and ig- 
norance of mind that would ensue if we thought for 
an instant, that all of the most noble aspects of 
human feeling and human effort have not over 
and over again been illustrated in European 
affairs. They have; O! most gloriously so, but 
they have not prospered as they should have done, 
their results have not been as steadfastly estab- 
lished as they should have been, have not been as 
universally indoctrinated — so to speak — in the 
tissue and make up of the psychology of the 
European, contrasting in that respect with a finer 
and more generous and more noble cultural aspect 
of the emotions here in America, because those 
cultural aspects in this new land, under freshened 
conditions of temper and opportunity, have more 
happily encountered encouragement and perma- 
nence. 

To resume; after Caesar's conquest of Gaul, the 
Romans definitely inspired with the sense of their 
predestined role of world-owners, began the sub- 
jection of the Celtic tribes living between the Alps 
and the region of the Danube, from Constance to 
Vienna. Drusus, Tiberius, Varus, led the Roman 
legions, and reduced the vigorous resistance of the 



Tribe and Class 55 

tribes — that had not yet learned the utility of 
combination, inflicting too, with a careless dis- 
regard of consequences, and untaught by the 
wiser policy of Caesar, a subversion of the tribal 
forms of government, violently enforcing Roman 
justice, ruthlessly imposing Roman taxes. 

Then came Hermann, the first german leader, a 
man of strength, of animation, of quick intelli- 
gence, with bright eyes. He succeeded in uniting 
the tribes, though he met the opposition of petty 
jealousies, quarrelsome habits, individual greed. 
His conspiracy was successful and at Winfield, 
"the long southern slope of the mountain, near 
Detmold, now bare, but surrounded by forests". 
Hermann defeated Varus.' Later he discomfited 
another Roman general Caecina, and then the 
Emperor Tiberius understanding the tribal in- 
felicity of disposition, its hopeless disunions led by 
rival ambitions, left the tribes alone, and divSsen- 
sion and disorganization asserted themselves. 
Hermann and Marbod fought it out indecisively, 
with Hermann the better of the contestants. But 
his fine conception of a united Germany failed, 
wrecked by the rooted prejudices of sept and clan, 
and Hermann was assassinated, he, of whom 
Tacitus with brief precision said; 

pro libertate bellantem, favor hahehat. 

Then followed a long, almost uninterrupted 
reign of mutual toleration, with a growing com- 
merce, the building of the great Roman wall of 
protection from Ratisbon to Cologne, and with it 



56 Europe's Handicap — 

a change of the tribal discontinuity to something 
like confederation, a process aided both by the 
appreciation of results and the sense of security. 
We are told (Sidney B. Fay) "when the Germans 
again appear in the third century of our era, we are 
surprised to find that the names of nearly all of the 
tribes with which we are familiar have disap- 
peared, and new names of much wider significance, 
have taken their place. Instead of twenty or 
thirty small divisions, we now find the race con- 
solidated into four chief nationalities, with two 
other inferior though independent branches". 

The multivarious clans have consolidated and 
congealed into the Alemanni, (all men), along the 
Main and in south-western Germany; the Franks 
on the Lower Rhine and stretching over Belgium 
and Westphalia; the Saxons between the Harz 
mountains and the North Sea, from the Elbe 
westward to the Rhine. The Goths issued from 
the Baltic and pressed southward and eastward, 
and finally covered the territory north of the 
Danube and the Black Sea, behind whom, over 
the trackless depths of Russia, dwelt the Slavonic 
races; the Thuringians were in central Germany, 
and the Burgundians finally came to rest on the 
west bank of the Rhine between Strasburg and 
Mayence. 

The Goths in their two great divisions of the 
East Goths (Ostrogoths), and the West Goths 
(Visigoths), rivet the attention of the historian 
from their ensuing collisions with the Roman Em- 
pire, and the forthcoming developments that 



Tribe and Class 57 

shaped the embryonic and figurative outlines of 
the dawning nations. 

Driven from their homes by the invading Huns, 
the Ostrogoths crossed the Danube and settled in 
the provinces of the Roman Empire. Their 
treatment was severe, and odious, and rising, with 
the help of arms secretly procured, they conquered 
their masters, and under Fridigern laid waste 
Thrace, Macedonia, and Thessaly, and remained 
in the latter country. Later under the opposed 
captains of two roman armies, the Franks from 
the West and the Goths from the east, met in the 
battle of Aquileia. This victory of the eastern 
emperor Theodosius was shortly followed by the 
rise of a remarkable warrior Alaric who actuated 
by rage, or ambition, or jealousy, started a large 
body of his people on a systematic excursion of 
pillage, and finally took the city of Rome and 
ransacked it, liberating some forty thousand 
slaves who escaped to his camp. Three times he 
repeated this exploit, and with successive repeti- 
tions of outrage and extortion. The Visigoths 
continually moved westward, and came to rest on 
the Atlantic, in southern Gaul and Spain. 

The tribal pressure had become intense, and 
the motion of the Huns had unsettled all of the 
promiscuous populations, and inaugurated fresh 
brigandages. The Vandals, Alans, Suevi, and 
Burgundians, under a chief named Radagast 
crossed the Alps and demanded territory for new 
homes. They were repulsed, and then, diverted 
to Gaul, separated, and confiscated new lands, the 



58 Europe's Handicap — 

Vandals subsiding in the present Andalusia, the 
Alans in Portugal, the Burgundians in western 
Switzerland, and the Suevi in Galicia. In the 
fifth century the Marcomanni seem to occupy 
Bavaria, between the Danube and the Alps, and 
Thuringia and established a kingdom in central 
Germany, while the restless tides of Hun and Slav 
impetuously drove hither and thither on the 
eastern boundaries of their domain, until Attila 
plunged through Europe with his swarms of 
savages, numbering, with the quickly attracted 
Goths, perhaps seven hundred thousand fighters. 
We have rehearsed his defeat at Chalons. 

The bewildering spectacle of rapine, brigandage, 
and freebooting-adventure, continues, and, invited 
by the Empress Eudoxia of Rome, the Vandals 
under Geiseric leave Carthage in Africa where an 
arm of this people had penetrated, and plundering 
the shores of Sicily, march on the imperial city, 
take it, and rifle it of its treasures, and desert its 
inhabitants, plucked of the last vestiges of liveli- 
hood. As an excellent summary of the events 
reviewed. Dr. Fay's own words may be quoted; 
"during the fourth and fifth centuries the great 
historic achievements of the German race, as we 
have traced them, were performed outside of the 
German territory. While from Thrace to the 
Atlantic Ocean, from the Scottish Highlands to 
Africa, the new nationalities overran the decayed 
Roman Empire, constantly changing their seats of 
power, we have no intelligence of what was 
happening within Germany herself. Both 



Tribe and Class 59 

branches of the Goths, the Vandals, and a part of 
the Franks had become Christians; but the Ale- 
manni, Saxons, and Thuringians were still 
heathens although they had by this time adopted 
many of the arts of civilized life." 

The Ostrogoths came into Italy under Theo- 
deric,and then, after his death, under the renewed 
hopes of the eastern Emperor to recover Italy, 
ensued a desperate combat between the goths and 
the empire, while the tribal allies — the Visigoths, 
Franks, Burgundians, and Alemanni, all greedy 
for plunder — served both sides, flocking to the 
standards of both armies. This titanic conflict 
lasted for over eleven years and ended by the 
annihilation of the goths near Vesuvius whose 
despairing remnant — one thousand strong — left 
Italy. With them the name of the Ostrogoth, 
like a quenched star, vanished from the page of 
history. Invited by the great general Narses, 
against whom the perfidious courtiers of Constanti- 
nople were plotting, the Longobards (Long beards) 
were introduced into Italy. These tribes, en- 
compassed with hostile neighbors, welcomed the 
chance of escape from their perilous position, and, 
under their chief Alboim, entered through Italy, 
across the unprotected passes of the Alps, with 
their flocks and families and household goods, and 
established themselves — only again after inter- 
mittent struggles — in northern Italy, in the 
province of Lombardy. 

The germanic tribes were thus scattered over 
Europe, and had encountered the civilization of 



60 Europe's Handicap — 

Rome at many points, while the ameliorating In- 
fluences of religion, in some measure, had softened 
their barbaric impulses, but the great central por- 
tion of Europe wherein was to grow the germanic 
kingdom was yet inchoate, and undetermined in 
its national form. Its development was con- 
tingent upon the establishment of government and 
a national existence in France, and the great 
Charlemagne as king of the Franks, started 
the movements and supplied the regional require- 
ments, that crystallized there into a labyrinth of 
minor sovereignties, interwoven states, and free 
cities. 

But the extreme and accentuated tribal discord 
and perplexity meets us in the regions from the 
Baltic to the Danube, and eastward over Russia, 
when the Lithuanian, the Pole, the Cossack, the 
Slav, filled the voids left by the disappearing Goths 
and wrestled savagely with each other, under 
chieftains animated by motives, that were pa- 
triotic, or selfish, or purely personal and fantastic. 
Here also, as Jeremiah Curtin tells us, "the ad- 
vance of the Germans on the Slav tribes and later 
on Poland presents, perhaps the best example in 
history of the methods of European civilization. 
The entire Baltic coast from Lubeck eastward was 
converted to Christianity by the Germans at the 
point of the sword. The people of the country 
deprived of their lands were reduced to slavery: 
and if any escaped this lot, they were men from 
the higher classes who joined the conquerors in 
the capacity of assistant oppressors." Over this 



Tribe and Class 61 

fated area as Sienklewitz describes it, in his lurid 
tale of war, extermination, spoliation, and rivalry — 
to the eye, in the reading, rendered more pre- 
posterous by its consonantal jargon — the incessant 
concussion of tribe and tribe, in frantic combats, 
had carpeted the ground with the dead. 

"How many struggles were fought in that 
region, how many people had laid down their 
lives there, no man had counted, no man re- 
membered. Eagles, falcons, and ravens alone 
saw these; and whoever from a distance heard the 
sound of wings and the call of the ravens, whoever 
beheld the whirl of birds circling over one place, 
knew that corpse or unburied bones were lying 
beneath." 

Mr. Curtin has attributed an extraordinary 
value to the history of Russia, as involving con- 
siderations connected with that country's over- 
whelmingly increasing influence in Europe. He 
says (Preface to translation of The Fire and 
Sword.); ''the Slav history is interesting to the 
man of science, it is interesting also to the practical 
statesman, because there is no country in the 
Eastern hemisphere, whose future may be con- 
sidered outside of Russian influence, no country 
whose weal and woe may not become connected 
in some way with Russia." This opinion, we 
suspect, may be attributed to a personal and an 
emotional interest in the enormous dramatic 
intensity of the historic episodes, and to the 
mastery of its author of the language and 
chronicles of these eastern barbarians. Russia 



62 Europe's Handicap — 

is in mass impressive, in individual distinction and 
in genius phenomenal, in its mere numerical human 
contents formidable, but it is governed by an 
outrageous despotism, controlled by a fanatical 
bigotry, and inflamed by dreams, which rhetoric 
decorates with illusions, and an antique statesman- 
ship, replete with fatalism, makes plausible with 
epigrams. Russia remains to-day tribal, and is 
still paralyzed with the rigidities of Class. 

The nucleal Russia, which by conquest and 
treaty and absorption, became the Russia of to- 
day, was situated north of the Volga, and east of 
the Vistula. It was governed by princes whose 
disintegrating methods of succession kept it most 
diversely ruled, and embroiled it in chronic dis- 
turbances, while frontier collisions with enemies, 
who begrudged it its land, or from whom, with a 
reciprocal cupidity, it desired or needed to acquire 
more territory, were continual. With the Finns 
on the north and east, with the Turks — Khazars 
and Petcheneks — on the south and east, with the 
Lithuanians on the west, the friction was incessant, 
and the methods of tribal warfare were literally 
reproduced. We are told (Morfill and Fryer), 
that "the initiative lay with the princes who, with 
their drujinas, or armed bands, wrested the land 
from the original inhabitants, and protected the 
settlers, to whom they granted the privilege of 
occupation. Thus the conditions under which 
these new principalities were created tended to 
exalt the position of the prince, and fostered the 
assumption of an autocratic power, which has 



Tribe and Class 63 

flourished with varying degrees of vigor ever 
since." 

In the middle of the Ninth century Slav tribes 
covered the area of the Baltic coast west of the 
Vistula; ''a line drawn from Lubeck to the Elbe 
ascending the river to Magdeburg, thence to the 
western ridge of the Bohemian mountains, and 
passing on in a somewhat irregular course, leaving 
Carinthia and Styria on the east, gives the 
boundary between the Germans and the Slavs at 
that period." (Curtin). 

North of Bohemia, in a land skirted on its 
southern margins by the Carpathian mountains, 
lived the men of the plain, the Polyane, and this 
region became afterwards Great Poland, which is 
now South Prussia. This region under ambitious 
counts was extended westward, and its greatest 
extension was about half way between Stettin and 
Lubeck. The Slav tribes were beyond towards 
the Elbe, while the invading Germans, with an 
incessant pressure, marked by more energetic and 
fruitful encounters, thrust out their hands for the 
territory of the Slavs. East of this roughly out- 
lined district of Poland was Russia. 

Later the Germans continuing their encroach- 
ments drove the Poles from the Baltic, and 
''turned the cradle of Poland into South Prussia", 
(Curtin). The Poles allied themselves with 
Lithuania, and attempted the hopeless task of 
appropriating or assimilating Russia. 

Russia, Mr. Curtin avers, dates from the year 
862, when Rurik came to Novgorod to rule over 



64 Europe's Handicap — 

the people. Then succeeded Kieff on the Dnieper 
as the metropolis of the country and the capital of 
its interests, political and religious, which was 
later in 1157 displaced by Moscow. In 1240 the 
Tartars subjugated Russia, and half a million of 
these destructive bandits swarmed over it, but 
were repulsed in their western drive into Silesia 
and Moravia. The Tartars ruled 250 years, and 
when Russia was liberated, its dimensions had 
woefully shrunk, as compared with the vast 
region previously acknowledging the supremacy of 
Russia. The area taken away embraced the rich 
country of Little, Red, Black, and White Russia, 
stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea. 

This was Lithuanian Russia, which had arisen 
from the amalgamation of a dozen or so of tribes, 
later reduced to servitude by the Teutonic Knights 
and by the Knights of the Sword, with two excep- 
tions, (Curtin), the Lithuanians proper and the 
Samogitians. In the first unrelieved anarchy and 
disunion their troubled condition invited strong or 
artful men to attempt their rule, and under a suc- 
cession of princes their slender property was 
handsomely enlarged, until it acquired the con- 
siderable proportions mentioned, "extending to 
the Crimea, and including the whole basin of the 
Dnieper, with its tributaries, together with the 
upper Dvina." 

The Struggle then naturally ensued, under the 
controlling impulses of action which animated the 
Tribe and Class, for one or the other — Poland or 
Lithuania — to absorb each other. However Po- 



Tribe and Class 65 

land and Lithuania became gradually united 
through interests and processes, more or less 
ambitious, simply, or conventionally arising from 
the heraldic association of the Lithuanian families 
with Polish nobility, and finally — against of 
course protest and dissent and violence — the 
Polish efforts culminated in complete success, with 
the balance turned in favor of the Polish nobility. 
Then the further struggle developed of Poland 
endeavoring to maintain itself, crushed between an 
aggressive teutonic power on the west, and a 
formidable acquisitive realm of barbarians on the 
east. The historian points out the blunder of 
Poland in fighting the Cossacks and Russians, in- 
stead of conciliating them, and turning their atten- 
tion to moderating or expelling the german reten- 
tion of the Baltic coast. "The Polish nobility, 
who were the state, possessed at the time of 
Yagello's coronation all the land, and owned the 
labor of the people; later they ceased to pay taxes 
of any kind." To enjoy this indulgence and 
eminence of position and privilege, was a great 
temptation to the nobles of Lithuania and Russia. 
There was still an item of permanent discord, and 
it was religious. The eastern christians belonged 
to the eastern church, which did not recognize the 
supremacy of the Pope. The attempt was suc- 
cessfully made to effect a union of the eastern and 
western catholics, and while the eastern congrega- 
tions might retain eastern customs and eastern 
liturgies, the Pope was to be accepted in his 
ecclesiastical sovereignty. 



66 Europe's Handicap — 

The Russian inhabitants of the subsidized and 
enslaved country, where Poles or Polanlzed 
Russians absolutely tyrannized over every cir- 
cumstance, station, and holding of the people, 
fiercely resented this control and enforced submis- 
sion to a material and religious oligarchy. The 
Poles and all of their adherents were ranged in 
conflict with the Cossacks and the Russian people, 
with the Lithuanian protestants, recalcitrants, 
and the original land owners. The complexity of 
violence, bloodshed, deceit, conspiracy, and rapa- 
city, is further confused by the infusion of the 
Tartar interests, who were solely intent upon forc- 
ing their domination upon the entire realm of 
Russia. The Poles whipped the Cossacks at 
Berestechke but the triumph was short lived in its 
effects. A singular love-affair enters the tangled 
skein, and the Poles contend with each other at a 
critical moment before their enemies, the Cossacks, 
who suddenly realizing their opportunity, smite 
the Poles with a ruthless vengeance, and suffer less 
than five hundred to escape from an army of 
twenty thousand. "The peasants in all of the 
country about killed the fugitives with scythes 
and clubs." There was a further battle with 
Mark Sobiesky who was overwhelmed. The 
Poles now confronted the Cossacks and the Tar- 
tars, but averted the hostility of the latter by 
plentifully distributed bribes of gold, which 
momentarily released them from the added incur- 
sions of these oriental savages. 

The Russians combined, put to flight the Tar- 



Tribe and Class 67 

tars, who had for over two hundred years intimi- 
dated and oppressed them, and at the critical 
moment the Polish king resigned; finally Russia 
winning now with an easy, and almost unmolested 
hand, under Katherine II, brought about the 
union of western to eastern Russia, and the desti- 
nies of Poland darkened and finally, under later 
events, distinguished by the inexpugnable traits of 
European tribal rapacity, disappeared, in a 
quartering, whose able and self-complacent 
butchers were Russia, Austria, and Prussia. 

Were we inclined to prolong much further this 
review of the tribal origins of the European nations, 
the forcible impression of, that fact would be 
greatly confirmed in any inspection of the areas of 
south-eastern Europe, which Mr. Harry De Windt 
has appropriately named Savage Europe, (though 
for that matter it is not difficult to see that 
Savagery, less flagrantly and visibly, afflicts all of 
Europe), and which embraces Rumania, Monte- 
negro, Servia, and Bulgaria, while much of its 
history is also bound up with the slowly evolving 
dual kingdom of Austria-Hungary. For the tribal 
nature of the populations of Austria is well illus- 
trated by Freeman's remark "that there is no such 
thing as an Austrian language, that a whole crowd 
of languages are spoken within the dominions of 
the sovereigns of Austria — German, Magyar, 
Italian, Ruman, and the various dialects of the 
great Slavonic majority". And in the same con- 
nection the dominant influence of Class in this 
kingdom is also relentlessly exposed, when the 



68 Europe's Handicap — 

same writer tells us ''such phrases as 'Austrian 
interests', 'Austrian policy', and the like, do not 
mean the interests or policy of any nation at all. 
They simply mean the interests or policy of a 
particular ruling family, which may often be the 
same as the interests and wishes of particular parts 
of their dominions, but which can never represent 
any common interest or common wish on the part 
of the whole". 

And in the same way no one is correct in speak- 
ing of Turkey as the consolidated expression of a 
single people, for the history of Turkey remorse- 
lessly shows that to-day its nationality has been 
an artificially super-imposed rule of a conquering 
tribe over a patch-work of less powerful and con- 
sequently subjugated tribes. This sort of thing 
generally has also been picturesquely character- 
ized by Freeman, as "a collection of scraps, with 
no natural connection, brought together by the 
accidents of warfare, marriage, or diplomacy". 
As regards Austria, the purpose of this essay need 
not be further distended by any reference to the 
historic incidents of the rise of this kingdom. We 
should encounter the recurrent presence of many 
of the tribes, whose migrations and wanderings, 
invasions and repulses, we have already met, with 
the intermixture of a few others, and much addi- 
tional interpolation of uncertainty. The tribal 
heterogeneity of Austria is significant, and the 
tribal autonomies, so far as tradition, language, 
and clannishness, goes, remains, deprived of that 
solidification that elsewhere, in the tribal elements 



Tribe and Class 69 

of European nations, has so largely obliterated 
primal contrasts, and secured an ethnic result 
approximately or superficially uniform. 

Here again is the Celt, who under such tribal 
names as the Boii, the Taurisci, the Scordisci, the 
Ambrones, occupied different parts of the original 
territory. Here are the lUyrians on the shores of 
the Adriatic. Here we find the omnipresent Goth 
or German, under the familiar names of the Suevi, 
the Marcomanni, and the Hermunduri, fighting 
the persecuted Celts; here also the problematic 
Dacian, along the Danube, thoroughly tribal in 
his instincts, for he robbed the lands of his neigh- 
bors, and profited by their dissensions. In the 
ever changing tribal confusion we meet Sarma- 
tians, Alemanni, Quadi, Jazyges, with the cata- 
clysmic advent of the deluging Avars, Slavs, and 
Hungarians (Magyars), and later the now familiar 
avalanch of the Huns. We find the Slavs follow- 
ing the Germans in the lands deserted by the 
former, and broadly constituted of Poles, Ruthen- 
ians, Slovens, Servians, Croatians, Czechs, and 
Slovaks. The Hungarian or Magyar state, so 
large a part of the Austrian dominion, was 
founded by the tribes coming from the Volga and 
the Ural Mountains, and whose tribal covetous- 
ness impelled them, to invade Europe further west, 
while as mercenaries they were employed by the 
eastern roman emperors against the implacable 
Bulgarians. History thus records their move- 
ments, "few examples of a migration so vast are to 
be found in the history of barbarian invasions. 



70 Europe's Handicap — 

Two hundred and sixteen thousand men bearing 
arms, which implies a total population of almost a 
million, are the numbers mentioned in the na- 
tional traditions, where it is said that this multi- 
tude took nearly three years to cross the Car- 
pathians." (Leger and Lingelbach). These 
hordes were Mongolian in ethnic affinities. Rest- 
less, unsubdued, prompted by the racial belliger- 
ency, which was not only fierce but skillful, they 
pushed outwards against Germans and Slavs, the 
inhabitants of Italy, and even to the limits of 
France in Provence and Champagne, until finally 
chastened by awful defeats and wholesale 
slaughters, in which their tribal neighbors fully 
satisfied themselves that they had extorted the 
last possible payment of their hate, the Magyars 
became christianized, settled down, and founded 
the kingdom of Hungary. The internal tension of 
Austria to-day is well understood, and the diffi- 
culty of maintaining a political equilibriumx is 
pretty well realized, when we learn that this tribal 
condition is "not a mere matter of dialects or local 
idioms, as is the case in Germany or in Italy, but of 
forms of speech fixed in literature used by the 
church, consecrated by usage, in political assem- 
blies, and made familiar every day in the press. 
Austria is a veritable Tower of Babel. It pub- 
lishes German, Hungarian, Polish, Ruthenian, 
Czech, Slovak, Ser-bo-Croatian, Slovene, Ruman- 
ian and Italian newspapers. And these news- 
papers are in languages, as a rule, unintelligible to 
all except those immediately concerned, and very 



Tribe and Class 71 

frequently represent diametrically opposed ten- 
dencies" (Leger and Lingelbach). 

Finally in this tribal dissection of Europe let us 
look at England — the United Kingdom — and con- 
clude this inspection, which may become futile 
through its laborious monotony. 

England — understanding by that term the 
United Kingdom — more favorably perhaps than 
any other country in Europe impresses the 
American observer as distinctly civilized, in the 
sense, observe, that in it the ethnic mosaic of parts 
are not so conspicuous, and that the traces of that 
tribal violence which startles the American in 
other sections of Europe are not so formidable. 
The tribal origins of the English state are unmis- 
takable, nor were they more exempt from those 
circumstances of warfare and bloodshed, with the 
attendant consequences of carnage, plunder, and 
enslavement, which marked the beginnings of all 
national life in Europe. 

These opening chapters of the rise of organized 
social government were everywhere in Europe 
engraved deeply with the characters of violence, 
spoliation, and oppression. Through the ines- 
capable action of heredity which no influence, 
short of extinction, can quite neutralize — and 
the Christian Church was a substantially amel- 
iorating or indeed a revolutionizing protestant 
against much tribal savagery — the strain of that 
earliest ferocity has been retained in European 
character up to this day. The survival, not in- 
deed bluntly or realistically noticeable perhaps, 



72 Europe's Handicap — 

is yet clearly seen in a harshness, a coarseness, or 
an absence of sympathy, and in an immoderate 
rejection in practice, of the theory — to put it so 
vaguely — of the Brotherhood of Man, and every 
new stride towards a complete or an extended 
national existence dishonors it altogether. 

Again the exasperating sway of Class is evident, 
retaining much that might have dropped away, of 
tribal crudity of sentiment, and contaminating 
much by its degeneracy of feeling. Songs of Hate 
are to-day vibrant in the countries of warring 
Europe, and where they are not heard probably 
their meaning is not unrecognized nor unfelt, in 
hearts too cautious of appearances to admit their 
vocal enunciation. And more probably still, such 
ruinous and disintegrating sentiments prevail 
more largely amongst those who wear the insignia 
of Class, and carry the names of obsolete and in- 
sulting priority over their fellow men; names 
which are not expressive of virtual preeminence, 
but have become tinselled with the glitter of a 
purely temporary and ancient artifice. 

The first inhabitants of England were a problem- 
atical race living in the stone age, and vanishing 
in a geological perspective like an extinct family of 
mammals. The Celts succeeded, and their tribal 
dissensions, the merciless inroads of their northern 
members — the Picts and Scots — who assume to 
the imagination the shaggy horribleness of some 
wolfish denizens of cliffs and forests, kept them in 
turmoils of conflict. These ancient British tribes 
seem to be indicated in the names of the Cantii, 



Tribe and Class 73 

Iceni, Atribates, Regni, Trinobantes, and Silures. 
Rome controlled England later, paved her marches 
with good roads, built cities and administered 
Roman law. Here the Roman general Suetonius 
had discovered — as Mr. James might say, had 
become sublimely conscious of the racial tension — 
when the infuriated Britons destroyed London — 
it is awe-inspiring to think of its antiquity — and 
reduced it to ashes, while "such of the inhabitants 
as remained in it were cruelly massacred: the 
Romans and all strangers to the number of 
70,000 were everywhere put to death without 
distinction." 

Rome's final desertion of the island permitted 
the northern marauders to renew their pillage and 
destruction, and the Briton confronted a new 
dilemma, which however was solved, to their own 
discomfiture, by their inviting the Anglo-Saxons 
to deliver them from their dangers. These last 
tribes speedily repulsed the Picts and Scots, and 
then in a succession of irrupting bands, from the 
continent, evinced their tribal facility of plunder, 
by seizing England, and quite definitely evicting 
the Britons. "A long chaotic period of savage 
warfare ensued; and nearly two hundred years of 
slaughter and suffering passed away before our 
Saxon ancestors established their Octarchy in the 
island; and even then, a considerable portion of 
the western district remained in the possession of 
the British, or, as the Saxons termed them, the 
Welsh." (E. S. Creasy). 

The Danes next made their appearance, and 



74 Europe's Handicap — 

their disposition was accurately anticipated by all 
the outrages that had preceded them. And 
their outrages were characteristically exasperated 
by perfidy. "The original affinity that had 
existed between the Danes and the Anglo-Saxons 
by no means mitigated the ferocity of the Scan- 
dinavian invaders towards the Germanic occu- 
pants of the island; it rather was a cause of 
aggravation. A change had taken place in the 
Anglo-Saxons, since their settlement here, which 
had broken off every tie between them and their 
Scandinavian kinsmen." That change was the 
christianization of the former. The Norman 
followed, and his pride of caste (tribal), his cruelty 
and brutal domination (tribal), have been im- 
partially mentioned; "even the aristocrats of 
ancient republican Rome were surpassed by the 
Norman nobility in pride, in statescraft, in merci- 
less cruelty, and in coarse contempt for the 
industry, the rights, the feelings of all whom they 
considered the lower classes of mankind." (Creasy). 
William the Conqueror is also detected in the 
exercise of an overweening avarice, (tribal), asso- 
ciated with that presumption of the prerogatives 
of monopoly which has characterized the Class 
formula down to the last century certainly, and 
probably within our own. "He obtained for him- 
self, and it may be presumed without trouble, a 
large share of the profits of the Conquest. His 
domains comprised fourteen hundred and sixty- 
two estates in land or manors, as well as the prin- 
cipal towns of the kingdom. The impositions 



Tribe and Class 75 

exacted from the Saxon rebels constantly swelled 
these possessions. Throughout the length and 
breadth of them he imposed taxes at his will, and 
by the same arbitrary means established custom 
dues on the importation and exportation of 
merchandise. Fines, penalties for crimes, the 
sale of public offices, as well as of the royal protec- 
tion and justice, were the source of considerable 
revenue, whereby an extraordinary and independ- 
ent power was assured to the king." (J.T. Abdy). 

From the amalgamated tissues of these different 
populations, involving their habits, tastes, accom- 
plishments, and previous civilization modern 
England has evolved. But almost at no point, in 
its glorious growth, would the analytical mind fail 
to trace the rude sequences of its tribal origin. 

The TRIBE is the heritage of the past; the 
form of the earliest possible social aggregation, and 
the expression, in its psychology, of the retinue of 
the unsubdued and yet immoderate passions of 
primal man. It doubtless is associated with a 
group of virile virtues, which comprehend the 
perennial splendor of courage, and endurance, and 
sacrifice, but these too are entwined or vitiated 
by the riotous growth of fiendish emotions, the 
sullenness of rage, the insensate thirst for cruelties 
and desperate assault, the ruthlessness of ven- 
geance. Under the influence, subtle, deteriorating, 
and shamelessly selfish, of CLASS, which also 
presupposes a conviction of individualistic sacred- 
ness, the symbol, arrogant and extortionate, of 
the predestined selection of a CLASS, intrenched 



76 Europe's Handicap — 

in their position by the conventional allegiance to 
a fixed succession, the tribal expression changed 
into something more contemptible and degrading. 
The device had its value and was a stabilizing 
motive in early societies. Around it grew the 
worst impulses of human pride, human selfishness, 
and human blindness. It humiliated the victims 
of its outrages, while it planted the seeds of a dull 
sycophancy in its admirers and subjects, and the 
natural consequences of its unopposed sway were 
a practical slavery of mind and body. Nations 
became the play-things of individuals and the 
interests of multitudes the unguent for the con- 
solation of wounded vanities. European civiliza- 
tion, developing alone under the dual control of 
tribal obduracy, self-sufficiency, and sternness, 
and of class arrogance and implacable greed, would 
have resulted in the most rigid and abominable 
social petrifaction. A wonderful religion saved it, 
though that same religion did not escape the 
infection of its turbulence, its vice, its bigotry, in 
other words its TRIBE and CLASS. 

Were we now, with the aid of reinforcing details, 
not given in these imperatively fragmentary 
sketches of the tribal state of Europe in Europe's 
formative stages, to estimate the tribal Character, 
and by that we mean to gauge its emotional con- 
tents and its habitual mental attitude, we should 
not hesitate to identify its dominant features as. 
Irritable Pugnacity, a predisposition to fighting; 
Intense Racial or Caste Pride, an irreducible self- 
consciousness; and Sterility of Heart, which 



Tribe and Class 77 

means many things, as duplicity, intolerance, 
brutality, covetousness. If we were interested in 
its better traits. Courage, Endurance, Vivacity, 
and Individual sparklings of Fidelity and Self- 
Sacrifice, might be assigned to the European ab- 
original, as among his virtues, while yet a tribes- 
man. All of these qualities — both good and bad — 
were strengthened and widened in their scope, as 
the tribes were constantly confronted with new 
experiences, in their clashes with each other, and 
in their clashes with Rome, wherein a sophistica- 
tion, not previously apprehended, added to their 
virtues and their vices, while a new and beautiful 
Religion complicated both. 

The Irritable Pugnacity cannot be questioned. 
It started aggressions and collisions on every side. 
The Racial or Caste Pride was never more sub- 
limely shown than in the indomitable resistance of 
the Nervii, who immortalized their name in its 
extinction, or in such instance of self-destruction 
as the deaths of Hermanric and Arbogast. The 
Sterility of Heart was all too thoroughly demon- 
strated in ravages and rapine — one recalls the 
fiendish cruelty of Attila, of Alaric and the 
ferocity of the marauding Goths, the Vandals, 
the Franks, and Saxons; in treason and malice — 
witness the killing of Hermann (21 A. D.) by mem- 
bers of his own family, the murder of Ataulf, king 
of the Visigoths, the murder of Odoacer by 
Theodoric, as also that of Boethius; in covetous- 
ness — recall Ariovistus demanding one-third of 
the territory he had defended, or the prompt 



78 Europe's Handicap — 

appropriation of England by Hengist and Horsa; 
in duplicity and caprice — these less obtrusive quali- 
ties, in the first engendering motions of modern 
Europe are less conspicuously seen in the first rude 
social elements of its composition, but the constant 
internal dissensions of the tribes, the beginnings of 
the promiscuous intrigues that were later to dis- 
figure the moral aspect of Europe, are certainly 
evidence of them, and they appear even in the 
tribal state in those terrible years of confusion and 
strategy when German, Lithuanian, Cossack, and 
Pole with wavering, extinguished and rekindled 
fortunes, fought each other over the broad table of 
Poland and Hungary, through the Black Country 
of Russia, and up and down the land, from the 
banks of the Vistula to the waters of the Danube 
and the Sea of Azov. 

The more subtle and more contemptible vices of 
feeling and conduct were yet to be grown upon the 
robust and sanguinary ruffianism of the barbarian, 
were indeed to vitiate much of his coarse and 
violent disposition with deceit and selfishness, and 
the lewd skill of meanness and self-indulgence, as 
well as to distort his strength into oppression and 
his mastery into intolerance. This later stage in 
the moral evolution of modern Europe was ushered 
in as the Class System completed its formal out- 
lines, and the Feudal System — necessary, inevi- 
table, and protective — evolved the domination of 
the INDIVIDUAL, the overcrusting of the social 
compact with the scintillating surfaces of title, 
decoration, dynasties, degrees, forms, appanage, 
and the fictions of Divine Rights. 



Tribe and Class 79 

The result variously tempered, variously quali- 
fied, variously restrained, in its different parts, is 
seen to-day in Europe, and though we may confi- 
dently expect that this last scientific and barren 
struggle will extirpate its continued usurpation of 
the plain rational and equivalent claims of sense 
and culture — call it civilization — yet this war with 
its brutalizing and decivilizing influence is the 
sequence of the Tribal Instinct, and illustrates the 
perpetuating force of the Class System. That does 
not mean that individuals alone have caused it — 
much as individuals in parlor councils and bed- 
room alcove conferences, drawing-room conversa- 
tions, and cabinet conventions, regulate things in 
Europe to-day, as they ever have done — for it is 
certain now that whole nations are interested and 
vitally in earnest, but it means that the Irritable 
Pugnacity, the Racial or Caste pride, and the 
Sterility of Heart remain and the posture and im- 
portance and the imposture, as well, of Class. 

We have hastily glanced at the tribal promis- 
cuity of Europe at the beginning of our era, and 
have suggested, in the patched and somewhat dis- 
ordered mosaic of historic references collected, the 
justification of our belief that the tribal nature 
representing the condensed expression of all the 
individuals in the tribe, in those aspects of it 
relative to this discussion, is found in the three 
qualities we have mentioned. 

Let us now inspect more closely, with reference 
to its rudiments and its results, the Class System, 
and at its conclusion review decisive or important 



80 Europe's Handicap — 

epochs in European history that proclaim the 
deteriorating or disturbing influence of the Tribe 
and Class, with some demonstration, at the close, 
of the involution of both as causae verae in the 
present war. 



CHAPTER IV 
The Origins of Class 

Pride in its paramountcy in human failings has 
been the source of man's chief sins, in its suprem- 
acy in character has been the noblest of his 
attributes. It's gratification furnishes the first 
incentives to personal ambition, and it has played 
the most destructive role in the devastations of 
human happiness. Class distinctions minister so 
naturally to pride, are so indubitably its 
consequence, that in the earliest groupings of men 
when the emotional complex has developed suffi- 
ciently to admit of ideal feelings, eminence of some 
kind was sought for, and in such stages of society 
it came with the display of strength, ability, robust 
power, muscular endurance, mental massiveness. 

The tribes in their vagrant state, and in their 
settlements, had their chief men, their leaders, 
who were either chosen in some general assembly or 
were hereditary. The patriarchal principle pre- 
vailed perhaps in the sedentary, agricultural, or 
nomadic communities, the survival of the fittest 
among the fighters. Guizot separates the original 
horde of barbarians into the tribe and the band, 
the former remaining more or less stationary and 
vegetative, the latter wandering, battling, en- 
gaged in pillage and in conquest. The tribe, 
under these limitations, may have been usually 



82 Europe's Handicap — 

governed by the patriarch, or if the tribe was a 
congery of families each submissive to its elder 
then "Its primitive element, Its political unity, so 
to speak In the language of publicists, was not 
the Individual, the warrior, but the family, the 
chief of the family." 

But the chieftains of the hand were the foremost 
warriors, and at the chief's table sat the 
"Geslthas", of the Anglo-Saxons, who received 
from their chief presents of horses, weapons, or 
portions of the subdued countries. Again King- 
ship, In a primitive fashion, was early evolved, 
and, as with the Homeric kings, who boasted a 
celestial lineage the Scandinavian or the Germanic 
kings claimed a supernatural descent, while a 
restricted elective system determined the succes- 
sion. "The three Scandinavian countries, that 
ultimately became the monarchies of Denmark, 
Sweden, and Norway, were originally subdivided 
Into numerous petty kingdoms. In each of these 
whenever the king died, his successor was elected 
out of the descendants of the sacred stock by the 
choice of the asembled freemen of the State. Part 
of the population was In a state of slavery or 
thraldom, the Inevitable result of the perpetual 
wars and piracies In which the Scandinavians 
Indulged. These unhappy beings w^ere of course 
destitute of all political rights; but every freeman 
capable of bearing arms might attend at the 'Ting' 
as the popular assemblies, both for legislative and 
judicial purposes, were called, and every freeman 
had an equal voice." (Creasy). 



Tribe and Class 83 

Most logically hereditary claims soon estab- 
lished themselves, and all the more readily as the 
simplicity of the method provided at critical mo- 
ments, when a choice was difficult or impossible, 
an instant continuation of the sovereignty. But 
the results of war in bringing vast regions under 
personal control, and investing a person with vast 
properties, determined a tendency, easily dis- 
tinguished in the antecedent groups, and an hered- 
itary kingship issued naturally from the slowly 
crystallizing materials of government. Then the 
tribal wars were continued in the disputes, san- 
guinary and cruel, of rival petty lords, from whose 
gradual extinction sprang .the omnipotent power 
of the king of the nation, wherever the principle of 
Monarchy could exhaustively locate and perfect 
itself. 

When the tribes began their incursions, when 
against the more settled or better circumstanced 
populations about them and beyond them, they 
started those intentional depredations, and exer- 
cised their tumultuous restlessness, pugnacity, 
and self-esteem, to acquire fresh possessions, they 
turned an organized world of men into a chaos of 
warring parts. Lands, towns, and countries, were 
overrun, divided, and the spoils of victory assigned 
to a multitude of followers. Chiefs of tribes be- 
came local potentates, whose faithful clansmen sur- 
rounded them with a hedge of belligerency, which 
impinged on every side with other hedges of 
belligerency, and laid upon the lands subdued, the 
most frightful and persistent plague of discord, 



84 Europe's Handicap — 

strife, confusion, and confiscation. It was 
throughout the periods of alternating tribal ex- 
cesses, and momentary Roman dominion, that 
more and more the differentiation of parts solidi- 
fied into a class society, which much later again, 
from the eighth to the thirteenth century became 
a firmament, as it were, of foci, each controlled by 
a Count, a Viscount, a Duke, a Baron or any other 
form of proprietary chief. 

Guizot graphically recounts the order of events 
in these surging and distracted days, when a new^ 
order of things was about to be ushered in, and the 
embryos of new social states were forming under 
the supremacy of might and force, the supremacy 
of individual and collective cupidity, against which 
with a transcendent or transcendental power, the 
spirit of Christianity unceasingly strove. Guizot 
says; ''after the invasion of the empire an im- 
mense territory was thrown open to the expedi- 
tions and eager avidity of the conquerors. They 
dispersed themselves throughout it in every direc- 
tion. The chief of them occupied vast domains. 
They were too far from each other to meet often, 
and deliberate in common. The political 
sovereignty of the general assembly became 
impracticable, was doomed to perish, and in fact 
did perish, giving place to another system, to that 
hierarchical organization of proprietors, distinc- 
tive of the feudal association and its institutions." 

Class became a necessity, all previous ten- 
dencies towards class distinctions were superla- 
tively intensified, and slowly, surely, with a 



Tribe and Class 85 

deepening root of appreciation among the masses 
everywhere — and the masses everywhere through- 
out Roman rule also, had been pretty well flogged 
into understanding it, and almost into assuming 
its absolute legitimacy — the fabric of Aristocratic 
Oligarchy rose upward, more clearly and clearly 
seen, as the turmoil and noise of the first confu- 
sions faded from the ears, and the dust and attri- 
tions of the first shocks of appropriation settled 
before the eyes. 

The tribal instinct of force, as the arbiter of 
place, ruled in a rough confederacy of lords, who 
affirmed their prerogatives with the emphasis of 
the tribal self-consciousness, and who, in a hun- 
dred ways, illustrated also the tribal Sterility of 
Heart, in covetousness, in cruelty, and in treachery 
as well. And yet the rougher power of the tribal 
sincerity of might and force, as a wholesome 
contrariant to the pruriency of personal malice and 
selfishness, gave to many of these first Lords of 
Creation, a half tone of manly honesty of intention. 
The later objectional heartlessness, the over- 
weening arrogance, the hideous bigotry of self- 
importance, which were later seen in Class, came as 
culture, and civilization itself, furnished the incen- 
tives to self-indulgence, self-glorification, self- 
assertion, and selfishness of all sorts. Perhaps 
we might use Guizot's words, employed in a 
different context; "the social condition of those 
ages was deplorable; human morality very in- 
ferior, according to what is told us, to that of our 
times. But in men individuality was strong — 
will, energetic." 



86 Europe's Handicap — 

Each thread of motive, each tendency of circum- 
stance, all the conditions of life, which favored the 
erection of Class, received from the Feudal system 
their complete ratification and enforcement. Then 
sprang into existence a varied panoply, so to speak, 
of officialdom, which dressed the suzerain in the 
livery of a superior being, and bred in the bone, 
marrow, and blood, of the common folk, the 
laborer, the slave, the retainer, the coloni, a vital 
consent to an irrevocable social structure of Top 
and Bottom. And there was, and there could be 
at the time, no humanizing, emancipating in- 
fluence, but that of the Church, which — no matter 
what were her blemishes — did stand for the ultra 
revolutionary principle of men's equality, under 
the limitations of merit and endowment. 

Then came the castle, with its household of 
many elements, and many names, the whole 
equipment conspiring to the maintenance of the 
greatness of the Lord and his estates, an extraor- 
dinary entourage of referendary, seneschal, mar- 
shal, falconers, butlers, cup-bearers, chamberlains, 
porters, harbingers, pages, varlets, grooms, and 
squires, and these last of many sorts. The castle 
appeared with its mighty walls, its wandering 
complications of outline, its moats and towers, 
with its splendid isolation on a peak or hill top, and 
its incessant dread, for the times were tribal, and 
war, force, invasion, spread far and wide the 
tremor of possible disaster. The castle we are 
told (Monteil) "must be seen when at sunrise, the 
outward galleries glimmer with the armor of the 



Tribe and Class 87 

sentinels, and the towers are shown all brilliant 
with their large new gratings. These high build- 
ings must be seen, which fill those who defend them 
with courage, and with fear those who should be 
tempted to attack them. 

"The door presents itself all covered with heads 
of boars, or wolves, flanked with turrets, and 
crowned with a high guard-house. Enter, there 
are three enclosures, three moats, three draw- 
bridges to pass. You find yourself in a large 
square court, where are cisterns, and on the right 
and left are the stables, hen-houses, pigeon-houses, 
coach-houses; the cellars, vaults, and prisons 
are below; above are the dwelling apartments; 
above these are the magazine, larders or salting- 
rooms and arsenals. All the roofs are bordered 
with machiolations, parapets, guard-walks, and 
sentry boxes. In the middle of the court is the 
donjon, which contains the archives and the 
treasure. It is deeply moated all round, and can 
only be entered by a bridge, almost always raised. 
Although the walls, like those of the castle, are six 
feet thick, it is surrounded up to half its height 
with a chemise, or second wall, of large cut 
stones." That castle was the symbol of a central- 
ized Aristocracy. 

The feudal system represented the dismember- 
ment of political unity and in the fluid state of 
social conditions when, as Guizot says, "the ele- 
ment which became dominant was that of con- 
quest, of force," the unprotected, the defenceless, 
the timid, the weak, sought the guardianship of 



S8 Europe's Handicap — 

the strong feudatories, and thus by a concretionary 
action, started through the disorganization of 
government, centres of administration were 
scattered wide-cast over the land. These were 
the Lords, around whom had concreted a host of 
dependents and leudes, whose relations to the lord 
were distinctly those of obligation. The slave — 
Servi — was not wanting of course, the tiller or 
landsman, the villein — coloni, adscriptitii, censiti — 
the free men — ingenui — and the knight or com- 
panion in arms, whose personal relations were 
most intimate, but always subservient and which 
character "they sought to give it by the ceremonies 
of homage, the oath of fidelity and investiture". 

For centuries the oppression of Class deepened 
under the necessitous position of the vassal to his 
seigneur, whose territorial rights were great or 
small according to his rank in the army of pro- 
prietary chiefs, and were further accentuated by 
reason of the incessant friction between adjoining 
feudatories. "The possessors of fiefs were always 
in a state of disunion and war amongst themselves, 
continually obliged to have recourse to force, 
because no supreme truly public power was pres- 
ent to maintain between them justice and peace." 
(Guizot). 

This unbroken warfare only served the strength- 
ening of the claims and the importance of class, and 
more and more deeply engraved in the mental 
impressions of men its reasonableness. The 
majesty of Class, while its fortuitous and lesser 
lights faded before the eyes of the people, with the 



Tribe and Class 89 

rise of the King, became endowed with a sublimer 
prerogative, as — in France at least — the king 
opposed the land Barons, and slowly, through art, 
and bribery, and force, absorbed the galaxies of 
subordinate rulers as regards supremacy, though 
with respect to recognition and degree, these lords 
retained their social priority. 

Chivalry appears a dissonant feature in the 
feudal system, because of its romantic loftiness of 
vows, the rectitude of its professed purposes, and 
the idealism of its legends. But the tribal and the 
class nature had little share in its creation, so far 
as its creation reflected a generous consecration of 
effort for the relief of distress, and the succor of the 
lowly and helpless. It has here also been shown 
by Guizot, that the noble essence of chivalry was 
practically instilled into it by the inspiration of the 
Church. Chivalry was in part a reaction against 
the wholesale rapacity of Feudalism. Abdy 
writes "there can be no doubt (for the chronicles 
and the laws prove it) that from the seventh to 
the tenth century the proprietors of small alods 
were little by little robbed of their small holdings, 
or reduced to the condition of tributary tenants 
by the rapacity of the great proprietors." 

Not a step forward in the history of the develop- 
ment of the final preeminence of the King in 
France, who gathered together in himself the 
privileges of the great feudatories, but served to 
illustrate the ubiquity of Class, its exorbitant 
exemption from fiscal burdens, and its monopoly 
of the benefits of national existence. The rise of 



90 Europe's Handicap — 

monarchy in the midst of an aristocratic assem- 
blage of titles, tributary to its central effulgence 
was effected slowly in France, and it arose from 
the slow disintegration of the Feudal System. 
That system had perfected the Class idea, and 
elaborated its utmost possible divisions of place, 
which now clustered around the king himself, as 
the summation of the equivalent stations that had 
dignified the Lord. 

True Democracy is the last political evolution 
of civilization. The democracy of the Tribe is 
that of the herd, and in it, of necessity, the Class 
formula rises and maintains itself. All of the rudi- 
ments of government, as the Old World has dis- 
played them, involved the assumption of class 
superiority in groups of individuals, and the 
processes of Feudalism enlarged them, making the 
individual ruler, small or great, hereditary and 
despotic. In France the solution of the State into 
a congery of lesser governmental units, including 
even fiefs of the Church, controlled by Bishops, 
was most noticeable, and the slow extension of 
Kingly rule over these subordinate, often resistant 
and mutinous fractions of the nation, was a his- 
toric feature, whose operation was accompanied 
with disturbance, and all the unfortunate inflic- 
tions of craft, conflict, and conspiracy. 

The regnancy of the King compressed this 
anarchy of parts into a political solid. But the 
Class institution remained, and the impress of 
terraced social structure was permanently made, 
while to the King progressively flowed the united 



Tribe and Class 91 

emoluments and prerogatives and prestige of the 
consolidated factors, whose partial disappearance 
his own elevation advertised. They became the 
King's vassals, in place of being absolute suzerains 
themselves, and their wounded vanity, or their 
disabled powers of acquisition, received a com- 
pensation in territorial possessions, still consider- 
able, and in the establishment of groups of noble 
families. 

Feudalism, as well epitomized by Abdy, was "a. 
confederation of little sovereigns, of small despots, 
unequal among themselves, and yet possessing 
and owing, each towards the other, rights and 
duties, invested in their own domains, over their 
own immediate subjects with absolute arbitrary 
power." An undivided Monarchy replaced it, 
but all of the stigmata of its past emblems and 
symbols were perpetuated. The people, the na- 
tion, gained, in many ways, which does not con- 
cern this thesis, but Class continued, and with it 
a spurious conception of human relations, treacher- 
ously subversive of any ideal liberty. It was com- 
bated, it was denied, but practically its validity 
was unimpaired until the Revolution. And 
throughout the feudal period, with vassal and 
suzerain, in an ascending chain to the King — him- 
self a great suzerain, momentarily powerless to 
restrain his obstreperous and avaricious or purely 
bellicose (tribal) satellites — throughout the Tribu- 
tary system of lands, which Abdy asserts preceded 
the feudal in form, though surely identical in spirit, 
throughout this epoch, force was the sole guarantee 



92 Europe's Handicap — 

of rights, and the indelible imprint on the Euro- 
pean consciousness, that Might make Right, 
implicitly, if not explicitly, rules its political 
theories to-day. 

Let us now turn (our reflections have been 
applicable almost solely to France) to England, 
and note how there also Class became introduced, 
in a historic process, somewhat diverse from its 
use or rather genesis in France, but nurtured by 
similar conditions not indeed always congenial to 
human vanity, to the venial sin of the love of 
power, domination, self-importance. Without re- 
garding the Britons, in whose social organization 
the chief, rudely adumbrated Class, the Bretwalda, 
with his "glib of matted chestnut hair, and 
moustache, broad-chested, long armed, high- 
cheekboned, with plaid thrown loosely about him, 
living among his clan in patriarchal fashion, with 
fighting men ready to do his will, and with none to 
share his power save the druid and the bard," 
without considering that dim and Druid-haunted 
past, consider the social fabric under the Anglo- 
Saxons. There was the King (cyning) his wife 
(cwen), and the attendants of the court, whose 
functions imitate or anticipate, with an equal 
vivacity of invention, the numerous supernumer- 
aries in the continental feudal lord's household. 
These were the chamberlain {cuhicularius , earner- 
arius), the marshal, (comes stabuli), the steward 
(dapifer, disciferus), the butler, (pincerna). And 
these were not simply useful domestics. The 
positions, assimilating a peculiar dignity from 



Tribe and Class 9?t 

their proximit}' to the King, and to the immaterial 
mifiiiiia that guarded him, were held by noble men, 
could only so be held. And Mr. Kemble asserts, 
"as the kingly power rose in influence and strength, 
so these offices attained to distinction, and became 
dependent on the royal favour. When the freemen 
perished, and the notion of thaneship took the 
place of freemanship, these officials, as the trusted 
friends of the King became his agents in the 
administration of the country." And in the 
growth of their importance, the holders of these 
offices graduated, by the most natural increase of 
effrontery, into critics and opponents of the king 
himself. 

We are told (Abdy, Lappenberg) that nobility 
"by birth was not observable among the Anglo- 
Saxons save in the case of descendants of the 
military king or sea-king". That is disputed, 
(Kemble), and a nobility by birth insisted on, 
which was later overshadowed by the growing 
power of the king. And Abdy suggests, "possibly 
nobility by birth among the earliest Anglo-Saxon 
people draws its source from the military or sea- 
king, and it is not impossible that in course of 
time the numbers of their descendants would 
increase so much as to form a considerable body of 
nobles by birth, the aethelings of the Anglo- 
Saxon communities." 

The tendency, as was inevitable, and in the very 
constitution, as a germ, of the original tribal rela- 
tions — a tendency greatly reinforced by events — 
was constantly towards the creation of Class, and 



94 Europe's Handicap — 

the ealdormen of the Anglo-Saxon, became almost 
pretentiously influential. "He was a noble of the 
first rank, having armed retainers of his own," 
and his house was almost inviolable. "Thus", 
says Mr. Kemble, "the position which his nobility, 
his power, and his wealth conferred upon him was 
a brilliant one. In fact the whole executive 
government may be considered as a great aristo- 
cratical association of which the ealdormen were 
the constituent members, and the king little more 
than the president." Thus long before the Danish 
invasion, the movement towards Class distinction 
was pronounced. Such designs are natural in 
communities or in nations, where a native arro- 
gance, (tribal), abets the necessities of govern- 
ment. Perhaps then the apparent notableness of 
being separated from the populace, the herd, 
stimulated a pleasant self-conceit, as to-day, in 
the immature or childish minds of American 
women, who marry for title. But also it had its 
stern reasonableness. The fierce pride of chief- 
tainship at that time is illustrated in the superb 
contempt of Sigurd the Dane who cried out, "I 
fear not death, since I have fulfilled the greatest 
duty of life: but I pray them not to let my hair be 
touched by a slave or stained with blood", and 
Abdy narrates that Siward of Northumbria, whose 
profession of Christianity deterred him from sui- 
cide, "stood armed and erect out of his bed, in his 
last moments, that at least he might not die 
huddled up like a cow". 



Tribe and Class 95 

The tribal ferocity of the Danes of whom the 
Normans were kinsmen, is well known; 

Count Witikind came of a regal strain, 
And roved with his Norsemen the land 

and the main 
Woe to the realms which he coasted! for 

there 
Was shedding of blood and rending of 

hair, 
Rape of maiden, and slaughter of priest. 
Gathering of ravens and wolves to the 

feast: 
When he hoisted his standard black. 
Before him was battle^behind him wrack. 
And he burn'd the churches, that heathen 

Dane, 
To light his band to their barks again. 

(Harold the Dauntless). 

Temperaments of that kind, harshly contemptu- 
ous of weakness, the lowliness of position, and the 
disgrace of dependency, were best adapted for 
forming separate orders, and bestowing upon them 
the stamp of exclusiveness. Under King Canute, 
the Dane, these were fully maintained. The 
Dane's transplanted kindred, the Normans, then 
entered England, as conquerors, helped by the 
treachery or the timidity of two northern earls, 
Edwin and Morcar, and England passed into her 
final ethnic phases, which Mr. Pearson has thus 
expressed "England without the Normans would 
have been mechanical not artistic, brave not 



96 Europe's Handicap — 

chivalrous, a state governed by its priests instead 
of a state controlling its Church". Chivalry 
which was introduced by the Normans into Eng- 
land, and which embodied the loftiest ideals of 
conduct — loyalty, courtesy, liberality, justice — 
was still a marked auxiliary and promoting in- 
fluence for the legitimization of caste, of Class; 
for ''the character of knighthood widened the 
separation between the different classes of society, 
and confirmed that aristocratical spirit of high 
birth by which the large masses of mankind were 
kept in unjust degradation." 

The Norman Conquest was another demonstra- 
tion of the vindictive ruthlessness, extirpating- 
violence, and rapacious egotism of the tribal spirit. 
William's devastation of Northumbria is thus 
detailed by a monkish chronicler; "he extended 
his posts over a space of one hundred miles. He 
smote most of the inhabitants with the edge of the 
avenging sword: he destroyed the hiding places 
of others: he laid waste their lands: he burned 
their houses, with all that was therein. Nowhere 
else did William act with such cruelty: and in this 
instance he shamefully gave way to evil passion; 
while he scorned to rule his own wrath, and cut off 
the guilty and innocent with equal severity. For, 
excited by anger, he bade the crops, and the herds, 
and the household stuff, and every description of 
food, to be gathered into heaps, and to be set light 
to, and utterly destroyed altogether: and so that 
all sustenance for man or beast should be at once 
wasted throughout all the region beyond the 



Tribe and Class 97 

Humber. Whence there raged grievous want far 
and wide throughout England; such a misery of 
famine involved the helpless people that there 
perished of Christian human beings, of either sex, 
and every age, upwards of a hundred thousand." 
The whole episode of the Conquest was convinc- 
ingly tribal in its unjustifiable robbery of land. 
William the Conqueror received the allegiance of 
the Anglo-Saxon feudatories, was properly en- 
throned and crowned, and confirmed the authority 
and supremacy of the Kingship, which in England 
had maintained its superiority and compass of 
control over the people. It was not so painfully 
evolved as in France, through the successive 
dissipation of subsidiary rivals, though in England 
again the nobles subjected the King to submission 
to public rights, a submission frequently more or 
less omitted. 

What exactly was the efifect of the Norman 
Conquest, that is its moral or cultural or political 
efifect, while much discussed, has nothing to do 
with the quest instituted here. The fact and the 
status of Class only interests us, and as they were 
adjusted by it the result is best given in the words 
of its most celebrated historian, John R. Green. 
"For two years William was able to busy himself in 
castle building and in measures for holding down 
the conquered land. How effective they were was 
seen when the last act of the conquest was reached 
* * It was as the unquestioned master of Eng- 
land that William marched to the north crossed 
the Lowlands and the Forth, and saw Malcolm 



98 Europe's Handicap — 

appear in his camp upon the Tay,to swear fealty 
at his feet." 

For William at once set about organizing his 
own ring of supporters, and he did it in the ap- 
proved and tried method of boss-rule. 

Nearly six hundred immediate vassals swore 
fidelity and homage to him, and, in order to pre- 
vent any independence on the part of those whom 
he most enriched, he took care to disperse them in 
their domains throughout the different counties 
of the kingdom. The Norman aristocracy was 
established twenty years after its first settlement. 
We are afforded by a contemporaneous writer 
William of Malmesbury a picture of the meeting 
of the Class, the archbishops, bishops, abbots, 
earls, thanes, and knights or as Abdy seems 
inclined to call them, the Barons. "By the royal 
edict there were convoked to the curia de more all 
the great men of whatever condition, in order that 
the envoys from foreign countries might admire 
the splendors of that assembled throng and the 
pomp of its feasts". The Barons attended 
periodic and regulative sessions, presided over by 
the King, which may or may not have been of 
great public utility, but at any rate were magnifi- 
cent and showy occasions. Over these barons the 
King apparently exercised a very real restraint, 
and enjoyed a lucrative relation also, as the levies 
in his favor in a number of contingencies were un- 
disputed, and were valuable; as when the heir 
attained majority, during his minority, and the 
''right of selling in some sort of form to the very 



Tribe and Class 99 

best bidder the hand of the female heir of a fief of 
whom the King was guardian." 

Of course the Class idea culminates in the 
grandiose station and authority of the King, and 
the king-fact was a very ancient one in European 
custom, while in Norman time the magnitude of 
the King's power was almost unlimited. "The 
king was himself richer and more powerful than 
any of his vassals. He could of his own will make 
laws, levy taxes, dispossess proprietors, condemn 
or banish unfortunate men — exercise, in short, on 
many occasions all the right of an unlimited 
sovereignty. A feudal association practically 
existed in Anglo-Saxon tirne; the finished product 
came over to England with William the Con- 
queror, and the homage of a vassal to the king, as 
late as Henry VI, contains the words, 'I become 
your man from this day forward, of life and limb, 
and of earthly worship; and unto you shall be 
true and faithful, and bear to you faith for the 
tenements that I claim to hold of you.' " 

Thus we see plainly that in England as in 
France by the time a Nation in its concrete pro- 
portions of ruler and people, with the functions of 
law and defence, were established, society was 
partitioned off into Classes, and the graduated 
series rose from slaves at the bottom to a King at 
the top, with an intermediate bond of freemen, 
and a shaded nobility.' The whole organism was 
responsive to this fundamental theory, that or- 
ganized government was and must be Aristocratic. 

Returning to the continent any, the slightest, 



100 Europe's Handicap — 

curiosity, as to the efficacy and ubiquity of Class 
is abundantly satisfied. Perhaps only in the free 
cities such as composed the Hanseatic League was 
the class pressure definitely relieved. That pres- 
sure certainly was experienced in the so-called 
Italian Republics, though here tempered, poorly, 
coarsely, by a popular oligarchy. But the fact is 
important, as a little longer extension of our review 
will help us to appreciate the deeply inwoven 
strands of that peculiar superstition of the 
relevancy of Class to domination, which for two 
thousand years has enthralled popular sentiment, 
and which though noticeably dying out to-day, is 
again, by this present war, stupefyingly thrust 
upon our attention. 

Beginning at once with the thirteenth and 
fourteenth centuries, we find over the entire area 
of middle Europe, when the magnificent co- 
ordinating genius of Charlemagne had partially 
reduced a chaos, a wild whirling storm of dis- 
membered and fractious principalities, to a tem- 
porary expression of unity — , we find the uni- 
versality of Class, the feudal relation fully fixed, 
and most variously developed. The lists of 
princely houses alone are interminable — Hohen- 
staufen, Babenbergs, Welf of Brunswick, Wittels- 
bach in Bavaria, Ballenstadt in Brandenburg, 
Zahringen in Baden, Lowen in Brabant and Hesse, 
the Counts of Habsberg, Luxembourg, Wirtem- 
berg, Hohenzollern, Nassau; south of the Alps the 
Earl of Savoy, the Visconti in Milan the Mar- 
graves d'Este in France, in Hungary the royal 



Tribe and Class 101 

house of Arpad, the old Slavonian races in Bo- 
hemia, Pomerania, Mecklenburg, and Silesia 
(Menzel); while the records indicate throughout 
this crowd of aspirants and powers, prevailed an 
unrestrained license of manners, the endless pro- 
lixity of strife, riotous in the East with the ferocity 
of the Hungarians, Servians, Wallachians, and less 
manifestly barbarous in the west, and everywhere 
agitated with uprisings and reprisals. A few 
paragraphs from Menzel quite graphically depict 
the tribal confusion and the class regimen — self- 
seeking and portentous — of the times, with the 
incidental reminder that the Emperor, struggling 
amidst his contentious subjects led a worried life; 
"the rule of the princes was most despotic in 
the Slavonian frontier provinces, where the 
feeling of personal independence was not so 
deeply rooted among the people; the princes 
of Brandenburg, Bohemia, and Austria, con- 
sequently, ere long surpassed the rest in 
power. In the western countries of Germany 
there were a greater number of petty princes. 
After rendering the emperor dependent upon 
themselves, the princes had to carry on a 
lengthy contest with the lower classes, the 
result of which was the institution of the 
provincial estate". 

"The tyranny of some of the princes, like 
Frederick the Quarrelsome, and Henry Raspe, 
occasioned confederacies to be set on foot be- 
tween the provincial nobility, the cities, and 
the peasantry against the princes." 



102 Europe's Handicap — 

"In the empire itself the officers of the 
crown had become hereditary princes, and 
their support of the emperor depended 
entirely on their private inclination. The 
emperor grasped but a shadowy sceptre, and 
the imperial dignity now solely owed its 
preservation to the ancestral power of the 
princely families to whom the crown had 
fallen. The choice of the powerful princes 
of the empire therefore purposely fell upon 
petty nobles, from whom they had nothing 
to fear; and even when the crown, by bribery 
and cunning, came into the possession of a 
great and princely house, the jealousy of the 
rest of the nobility had to be appeased by 
immense concessions, and thus, under every 
circumstance, the princes increased in wealth 
and power, whilst the emperor was gradually 
impoverished." 

"According to the mystical fashion of the 
times, the different grades in the empire were 
illustrated by the number of the planets. 
The empire was represented on a great camp 
with seven gradations, and seven shields, the 
first of which was borne by the emperor, the 
second by the spiritual lords, the third by the 
temporal princes, the fourth by the counts of 
the empire, the fifth by the knights of the 
empire, the sixth by the country nobility, 
the vassals of the princes, the seventh by the 
free citizens and peasantry, the serfs who were 
incapable of bearing arms, being excluded". 



Tribe and Class 103 

In the cities of the league or bund of the Hansa, 
which at its most prosperous extension embraced 
almost seventy cities, with fleets ruling the North 
Sea, with sovereigns tributary to its power, and 
countries obedient to its commands, when, we are 
told (Menzel), "the air bestowed freedom; who- 
ever dwelt within their walls could not be reduced 
to a state of vassalage, and was instantly affran- 
chised, although formerly a serf when dwelling 
beyond its walls," in these homes of Jacobinism 
and democracy, in the great Guilds, (Labor 
Unions), the contagion of class pre-emption and 
substitution made itself felt, since it not infre- 
quently happened that a son succeeded to his 
father's presidency of the guild of which he was a 
member, and these successions became per- 
petuated to such an extent, that the jealous arti- 
sans fearing some attack upon their liberty, de- 
vised a curb upon the president's power by 
qualifying it with a civic committee. 

The tangled, even very much snarled and 
involved drama of German history, illustrates 
quite luminously however, we think, the out- 
rageous and intolerable growth of a titled class, 
which monopolized government, perpetuated a 
divided, it might almost have been called — a 
pulverized State, and, in the exorbitance of its 
needs, with the added requisitions of an extrava- 
gant Court, besides the necessary expenditures for 
an army, wrung from the people the uttermost. 
Taxes were monstrous, and the superstructure of 
bureaucrats, princes, and nobility, weighed de- 



104 Europe's Handicap — 

structively upon industry and thrift. The confu- 
sion and the iniquities multiplied, and the picture 
presented seems a maddening, chaotic, or almost 
intricately composed. Bedlam of King, princes, 
electors, prelates, nobility, ofiftcers, lawyers, sol- 
diers, with a crushed proletariat that lay motion- 
less beneath. 

A troop of princes ruled, under a nominal 
sovereign, the various principalities, into which 
Germany was so disastrously apportioned. They 
had their courts, their armies, their clergy, their 
diplomacy, and their treasuries. The national 
Diet, itself two thirds aristocratic, was composed 
of three colleges or benches, those of the electors, 
princes, and cities, but it slowly declined, and the 
independence of its component parts, especially 
the princes, replaced it with an infinite confusion 
of Force, Caprice, and Envies. We read, ''the 
powerful princes pursued a perfectly independent 
course." The cities, whose coalition had been so 
effective in the fourteenth century, fell apart, 
became separately the prey of the attacks of the 
princes, or lost prestige and wealth through the 
encroachments of commercial rivals, while even 
in these, the original depositories of liberty, an 
aristocratic usurpation had handed their rule over 
to a few restricted families, whose relations again 
were made subservient to the idle vanities of 
pedigree, and age, wealth and kinship. The 
period was grossly barbarous in feeling at least. 
Force and compulsion (tribal) ruled the day, and 
extortion and cruelty mockingly insulted justice, 



Tribe and Class 105 

as two complementary figures of the times, placed 
high enough for all posterity to note their shame- 
less effrontery; ''Central and Eastern Germany 
was peopled with slaves, unpossessed of honor, 
wealth, or knowledge, the produce of whose toil 
was swallowed up by the nobility, the clergy, and 
the court," while "the simple punishment of death 
no longer satisfied the pampered appetite of the 
criminal judge. Torture was formed into a sys- 
tem, and the horrors practiced by the ancient 
tyrants of Persia and of Rome by the American 
savage in his warlike fanaticism, were, in cold 
blood legalized by the lawyers throughout Ger- 
many. The chopping off of hands, the cutting out 
of tongues, blinding, pinching with red-hot tongs, 
cutting slices out of the back, tearing out the 
heart, empaling, wrenching off limb by limb with 
the iron wheel, quartering with four horses or with 
oxen, in order to lengthen the torture, modified the 
simplicity of beheading, hanging, and burning." 
(Menzel). 

Conditions of this demonic wickedness were not 
peculiar to Germany. They were found every- 
where modified by circumstance, by individual 
preferences and nature, and they everywhere — if 
the logic of cause and effect is to receive from his- 
tory the credit of the recognition allowed to it 
elsewhere — were derivative from the Tribal heart 
and mind, which no changed circumstances of 
civilization had much ameliorated, and to the 
hardening influence of Class which, acting on the 
savage instincts of the tribesman, kills their seeds 



106 Europe's Handicap — 

of mercy and exasperates their bitterness. The 
ineradicable viciousness of the Class System is the 
emotional exaltation it imparts to its subjects, 
which converts them into literal human Molochs. 
Interference, contradiction, criticism, insults their 
infallibility, and reduces their self-esteem, making 
them obdurate and implacable. Class is only the 
artificial refinement of extreme vulgarity. To-day 
in the light of the emancipated wills and minds of 
this country, Kings become toys or nuisances, and 
all forms of hereditary title, the dull sophistry of 
expediency and affectation. The Tribal spirit of 
conquest and domination, and the Class spirit of 
supremacy and intrinsic distinction, from name or 
family, have been the prolific causes of Europe's 
persistent disorders, and the root of that inex- 
pugnable Militarism which now as a name so 
cornmonly stands for these very things, but is 
defective in accuracy, as it does not touch the 
genetic causes of this pestilential craving. 

Certainly Class-claims prevailed all over 
Europe, and the whole feudal system was itself 
the very embodiment of the Class ideal. Royalty 
was the ultimate expression of Class, and even 
where Royalty did not exist as in the northern 
cities of Italy which shot up as Bryce puts it, ''in 
the absence of the emperors and the feuds of the 
princes", still the ineradicable heritage of both 
nullified their superficial and supposititious de- 
mocracy. It cannot be gainsaid. Burckhardt 
intoxicated with his subject, elated with his ad- 
miration of art, and dazzled with the brilliancy of 



Tribe and Class 107 

the individuals encountered, has written of the 
Renaissance, which was most luxurious in its 
products in Italy, as a period when — to quote 
Gooch — "the fetters of a thousand years were 
burst, self-realization became the goal, and new 
valuations of the world and of man became cur- 
rent". It was a period of tropical exuberance in 
mental growth, but its unlicensed excesses of con- 
duct and of opinion, contained no real seeds of a 
lofty and genuine democracy. Neither in Venice 
or Florence, Pisa, Genoa, Milan, or in any of the 
Lombard cities, any more than had been the case 
with the Grecian communities was there attained 
a condition of enlightened self-government. The 
Lombard cities were brothels of continual disturb- 
ance, factional collisions, and incessant rivalries. 
They were fortified camps, and permeated with the 
tribal animus of belligerency, and in them Class, 
differentiated indeed greatly from the same thing 
under the monarchies of the rest of Europe, pre- 
vailed. 

They were in a perpetual hubbub of external 
animosities or internal confusion, and they did not 
excape the influence of the Class pretensions, for 
the very nobles, whom they compelled to live away 
from their castles for a certain time in the cities, 
"imbibed a new ambition of directing the munici- 
pal government of the cities, which consequently, 
during this period of the republics fell chiefly into 
the hands of the superior families" (Cabot). 
Everything was yet also tribal, although the sup- 
pression of Class for short intervals secured a 



108 Europe's Handicap — 

seductive appearance of liberal government. 
Certainly there was a spirit of resistance to tyr- 
anny most observable, but it was the tribal spirit 
after all, and the inflictions upon their vanquished 
foes, by these free cities, partook of the abomin- 
able rancor of the most hardened despots. "They 
played over again the tragedy of ancient Greece, 
with all its circumstances of inveterate hatred, 
unjust ambition, and atrocious retaliation, though 
with less consummate actors upon the scene" 
(Cabot). The turmoil of family brawls, and irre- 
concilable resentments, flavored the times with 
the geniality of class murders, and recriminations. 
At Genoa it was the Grimaldi, the Fieschi, the 
Doria, the Spinola; at Bologna it was the Giere- 
mei and the Lambertazzi; at Florence the Buon- 
delmonti and Uberti; at Pistoja the Bianchi and 
Neri, and Hallam tells us that "the members of 
each distinguished family appear to have lived in 
the same street; their houses were fortified with 
square massive towers of commanding height, and 
wore the semblance of castles within the walls of a 
city. Brancaleon, the famous senator of Rome, 
destroyed one hundred and forty of these domestic 
entrenchments, which were constantly serving the 
purpose of civil broils and outrage." 

The fires of freedom as an emotional tendency of 
course never have died out in the indo-european 
heart and mind, and the free cities of the past, the 
Italian so-called republics, the Hanseatic towns, 
the Swiss compact, and the splendor of English 
rebellion against tyranny, the Rise of the Dutch 



Tribe and Class 109 

Republic, with many minor incidents of the 
recrudescence of the primal instincts of liberty, 
have, in the European drama, maintained the 
indefeasible rights of men. Those fires attained a 
climacteric of retributive fierceness in the French 
Revolution, in the iconoclastic terrors of "the 
beggars", the wantonness of the English Round- 
heads, and in the late salient flarings of Italian 
nationalism. But the superincumbent mass of 
inheritance and tradition has overwhelmed these 
impulses; they never have acquired static perma- 
nence, for, except upon some tabula rasa of place 
or condition, they never have escaped the insidious 
perversion that springs from the Tribe and the 
Class. Pure Democracy never can flourish in 
Europe; its contemporaneous culture even rejects 
it with scorn, and the omnipresent genius of its 
institutions, which are tribal and aristocratic, 
repels it. 

In these free Italian republics Class gained its 
inevitable and pernicious sway, and where the 
nobility of family was denounced, through the 
inextinguishable pride of the human heart, the 
nobility of wealth was substituted. There could 
be no escape from it. Class from one end of 
Europe to the other subjugated the imagination, 
chained political adventure within the fetters of 
precedent, and, invading even the arteries of 
literary or philosophical speculation, poisoned 
them with the narcotics of its adulation. Litera- 
ture postured before Nobility, and philosophy 
craved with bended knees its acquiescence. To- 



110 Europe's Handicap — 

day the over shadowing impressiveness of these 
United States of America threatens the supremacy 
of the idea of class, and ameliorates the obstinacy 
and the cruelty of Tribe. But it matters little. 
Both will remain, unless by some titanic upheaval 
the world of Europe moves forward Into the areas 
of idealistic equality. Nobility there always will 
be, but It will be something different from heraldry 
and title; It will come to every one who can carry 
its proud insignia of character, and obey its sum- 
mons of sacrifice and duty. The policeman in his 
rescues, the fireman in his dangers, the Iron-worker 
at his task, are thus ennobled, and the aristocracy 
of mind can never die. 

We should not be accused of a flagitious and 
pedantic search for the traces. In the earlier days, 
with the rapid rise In later ones, of the Institution 
of Class, including all shades of Royalty, In 
Europe. Admitting that primitive conditions, 
wherein an emotional life begins to stir, was pro- 
pitious for its growth, and that only along Its 
track could follow the achievements of economic, 
Industrial, artistic, and literary genius — which we 
do not for a moment admit — admitting this pre- 
posterous assertion, our argument or demonstra- 
tion turns to proving, that these deeply burled 
roots of class pride and class Injustice, we have 
hastily Inspected, are alive to-day In Europe, that 
the effects of two thousand years of such distinc- 
tions, no matter how absurd they may seem, In the 
matter-of-fact light of simple common sense, can- 
not at once be cancelled, or erased, that they are 



Tribe and Class 111 

cherished now, and that the archaic vanities, still 
craving a historic continuity with the past, 
flourish abundantly and exercise an injurious 
influence, foment an imperious spirit, and endanger 
peace. That they still embody the tribal pug- 
nacity, irritable and ofi^ensive, the tribal self-con- 
sciousness, egotistic and intolerant, and the tribal 
sterility of heart, covetous, encroaching, heartless 
and unrepentant. 

Of course a duke is not to-day cutting off the 
hands and feet of his complaining subjects, nor 
burning out the eyes of his prisoners, nor confiscat- 
ing the wife and daughter of his vassals, but it is 
true that in 1868 (?) — notsp long ago — the Marquis 
of Stafford in Scotland evicted the poor crofters 
from his land, some 15,000 herdsmen with their 
wives and families, and subjected them to most 
undeserved and revolting sufferings, in order that 
he might more regally enjoy the widest indulgence 
to hunt deer; it is true that the English Govern- 
ment intended and did steal the land of Venezuela 
in 1895, and only refrained, because the voice of a 
president of a country, which is without Class, 
protested; it is true that the King of Belgium — 
King Leopold — practiced revolting cruelties upon 
the defenceless blacks of Africa, for his personal 
enrichment; it is true that the peers or landed 
nobility of England to-day object to a just taxa- 
tion of their lands, on the plea perhaps of their 
ancestral freedom from bearing the just burden of 
state; it is true that the King of Spain maintains 
expensive retinues while, in the language of a 



112 Europe's Handicap — 

student of the inward condition of his dominion, 
the wretched peasants who, to endue them with 
enough strength to undertake the labor of the 
vineyards, must be previously fed for a week or so, 
"are born starved, live starved, and die starved"; 
it is true that the Czar of Russia and the serried 
ranks of the high and mighty in Russia, apparently 
close their eyes to the enormities of burning, and 
looting and torturing the jews; it is true that in 
this same most adequate example of the modern 
perpetuation of Tribe and Class, for the preserva- 
tion of its class and its royal organization, for the 
satisfaction of its tribal pride, ''the Government 
first set the example of lawlessness in Russia, by 
arresting without warrant, by punishing without 
trial, by cynically disregarding the judgments of 
its own courts when such judgments were in favor 
of politicals, by confiscating the money and the 
property of private citizens whom it merely sus- 
pected of sympathy with the revolutionary move- 
ment, by sending fourteen-year-old boys and girls 
to Siberia, by kidnapping the children of 'politi- 
cally untrustworthy' people, and exiles, and putting 
them into state asylums, by driving men and 
women to insanity and suicide in rigorous solitary 
confinement, without giving them a trial, by bury- 
ing secretly at night the bodies of the people 
whom it had thus done to death in its dungeons, 
and by treating as a criminal in posse if not in esse, 
every citizen who dared to ask why or wherefore" 
(Kennan); it is true that the tribal and class 
spirit, its venom and its unfairness came to light 



Tribe and Class 113 

even in republican France, when after nearly two 
thousand years of oppression, wreaked upon the 
jews, whose injustice and wickedness had become 
the trite homily of every essayist upon religious 
bigotry, Alfred Dreyfus, a jew, was shamelessly 
conspired against by the officers of the french army 
and authority, and the public organs of opinion 
worked together to destroy him, where "in the 
last weeks of 1897 the men of the etat major had 
on their side the people who shouted loudest, and 
the french middle class were ready to believe, that 
a syndicate of Jews, eager to vindicate a Jewish 
traitor was vilifying the army", when, from begin- 
ning to end, the accusation was a fabric of lies, 
when a mockery of a trial condemned Emile Zola 
for his high-hearted courage in defending this un- 
fortunate, and where at every stage of the indecent 
persecution the instrumentalities of official in- 
fluence perverted the dispensation of Justice; it 
is true that the Turk of yesterday and to-day 
whose misgovernment and massacring facility 
terrified two continents in 1876 suffered no incon- 
venience from his atrocities, because the crowned 
heads of Europe at that time, and the convenient 
textual relations of nations at the same time, as 
managed by ministers and bureaus, could not be 
disturbed, at a time when the "basest and blackest 
outrages upon record within the present century if 
not within the memory of man", were committed 
whose "fell satanic orgies" branded the Turk as 
"the one great anti-human specimen of humanity" 
(Gladstone) ; it is true that the most abominable 



114 Europe's Handicap — 

injustice was practiced and the most heartless 
punishments inflicted upon Italian patriots by 
Austria, who left six or seven thousand state 
prisoners to perish in dungeons, and when sick 
prisoners, men almost with death in their faces, 
toiled upstairs to see the doctors, because the 
lower regions of the prisons, were too foul and 
loathsome to allow it to be expected that profes- 
sional men would enter (Morley), when a King 
violated the law and the constitution he had 
sworn to be faithful to, when corrupt tribunes of 
justice hurried the noblest (Poerio for instance) 
into irons for four and twenty years! 

All of these things and many others similar in 
degree and nature, which have transpired in 
Europe, are attributable, not always particularly 
to a member of the so-called upper classes, the 
titled and hereditary nobility, but to a toleration 
and approval generally or a not too loud con- 
demnation of wrong, because throughout the nation 
the atmosphere and the habit, the mental habit, is 
a direct genetic deduction from these long estab- 
lished (no matter how much modified from, their 
first unabridged excess) Class customs, reinforced 
by, or overlaid upon the still regnant Tribal spirit. 
War was the business of the Tribe, and the warrior 
represented the tribe's protection. Rule was the 
purpose of Class, and the nobles graduating into 
and surrounding the conception of Monarchy was 
the ideal of government. A group of pure democ- 
racies without either the Tribal spirit or the Class 
institution never could have in this day and hour, 



Tribe and Class 115 

started the present war, which, observe, began 
with the death of a member of Class and with the 
ambitions of Tribes. This awful and desecrating 
and senseless (except so far as its consequences 
imply the cleaning out of the Tribe and the Class 
in modern Europe) war rages to-day for nothing 
but material gain, possibly land, possibly trade, 
and the maintenance of dynasty. 

This book has been prompted by this latter 
spectacle, and only written as an attempted proof 
— well warranted — of the reference of the present 
war to the still surviving passions of the Tribe and 
Class. It has also been written with the convic- 
tion that any kind of governmental system or 
social contract, which is not controlled by the 
suffrages of the people, not vicariously through 
representatives but directly through appeal, is to- 
day a baleful subterfuge. But again these suf- 
frages MUST be the will of a people emancipated 
from the influence of Tribe and Class. No people 
to-day in Europe is practically free from either. 
The changed environment and the accumulated 
experience of many centuries has made Americans 
otherwise related to every topic they discuss, 
every posture they assume, every resolve they 
endorse. 

They are a New people; literally so, though in 
their blood flows the natal germs of every european 
nation, for they have undergone the transfigura- 
tion of liberty, of education, of self-use. As human 
beings we are full of faults, as a nation we are 
SUPREME. Our generosity to Cuba liberated 



116 Europe's Handicap — 

and rehabilitated by us, was magnificent, its 
superb altruism, or, in better language, its un- 
selfishness, paralyzed with incredulity the Tribal 
states of Europe, whose stuttering acclamations of 
approval, evinced the niggardliness of their own 
temperaments. Our whole-souled helpfulness at 
all times, as in the last cruel necessities of Belgium 
and the outcasts of Europe to-day, still more 
firmly expressed the fine ardor of American sym- 
pathy, and our protest to Russia against the dis- 
crimination hostile to the jews, sprang from our 
implanted hostility to unfairness. 

Oppression and selfishness have gone hand in 
hand, and with them public extortion and plunder, 
in the public conduct of affairs in Europe, and it is 
largely referable to the organization of their Class 
system, conjoined with the unavoidable transmis- 
sion of the tribal qualities which are coarse and 
cruel. England exploited shamelessly in the past 
the riches of India, and probably to-day would 
utilize, or does, her temporal advantages there for 
her own profit. She was inclined to do so with 
these American colonies. She has done so with 
Canada. Froude has drawn — and with no sym- 
pathy for Ireland or any constitutional respect for 
irishmen — the horrible misconduct of England 
towards Ireland in the 17th century, the conse- 
quences and continuation of which misgovern- 
ment lasted until the 19th century, and was only 
ended by the formidable championship of Ireland's 
cause by Gladstone. It was the desire to keep its 
balance of trade on the right side of the ledger that 



Tribe and Class 117 

made Christian England force, at the mouth of 
the cannon, upon a hopelessly weaker people a 
demoralizing drug, when she, as Treitschke puts 
it, "advanced to the conquest of an Empire with 
the Bible in one hand and an opium pipe in the 
other." The scandal of the DeLesseps' exploita- 
tion of the humble possessors of small and carefully 
hoarded means would seem scarcely possible, by 
reason of its far-reaching, all embracing enclosure 
of high society in its agents, abettors and bene- 
ficiaries, in any truly noble or just-hearted com- 
munity. American politics have been pretty 
thoroughly pilloried as corrupt before the world — 
though the picture is absurdly exaggerated, and 
much of it exactly reproduced in the public misde- 
meanors of other countries — but no group of 
American public men could have stooped to 
practices of such ineffable meanness as character- 
ized the efforts of so-called noble families of France 
to induce working men and working women to part 
with their scanty savings in an enterprise every 
agent of which realized its irremediable collapse. 
The political manipulators of this country, 
among those unquestionably irregular, have at 
least an attractive sense of human co-operative- 
ness, and are munificent in their helpfulness to 
their less happy friends and neighbors, unless 
indeed, as a Croker, they repudiate the country 
which gave them what they own. Our political 
Robin Hoods usually, and cheerfully, rob the 
comfortable, but spare the needy. The same 
degeneracy of feeling marks the conduct of many 



118 Europe's Handicap — 

of the foreign business men, who to-day have 
established private banks in New York to fleece 
their countrymen, which again in a lesser way re- 
appears in the crafty villainy of the Padrone sys- 
tem. It is a well accredited observation and a 
significantly fruitful theme as well in psychology, 
that social institutions mould temperaments, 
modify the sympathetic systems of men, inducing 
in them qualities responsively suited to their 
position, they occupy in those systems. A fact 
of this sort is apparent in a kind of moral degener- 
acy amongst some foreigners who become con- 
trastedly obsequious or supercilious and are 
stained with a depravity of motive in what they 
do and think. One irresistibly recalls the hunting 
for rich wives, an utterly opprobrious and despic- 
able business, and the recognition of vice in the 
capitals of Europe, where municipalities divide 
with the proprietors the profits of gambling, 
where a government actually is supported by the 
nefarious trade, running a roulette, a policy shop, 
on an enormously opulent scale, and where public 
treasuries do not hesitate to accept the proceeds of 
lotteries, and the sale of virtue. 

Class to-day lives in Europe in the cast-off 
clothing of an earlier time, when it was more 
necessary and more imposing and also more in- 
human. Let it he utterly abolished. 

In the first chapter we have reviewed cursorily 
the original and fundamental tribal elements of 



Tribe and Class 119 

European nationality; in this we have similarly 
observed the universality of the Class system. 
We shall now consider some Tribal wars, and ex- 
pressions of Tribal feeling, and with them examine 
Class domination, and thus arrive logically at the 
present war, which we assign to both. 



CHAPTER V 
Tribal Wars and Class Domination 

The most amazing and distractingly confused 
page of history or — if the image seems absurd by 
reason of the interminable length of any page 
which could embrace the subject — the most 
bewildering pages of history are those which record 
the Thirty Years' War. And the same pages, re- 
viewed by any one not professionally engaged in a 
mere tabulation of events, would produce the 
strange impression, allowing for the change of a 
thousand years or so, that he was reading the 
annals of the combats and battles, wars and 
alliances, of the ancient savages, whose blood had 
transmitted its almost unmoderated qualities of 
cruelty and truculence to their descendants with 
also, in the case of Gustavus Adolphus, its noblest 
traits. 

The names sound less romantic or more familiar, 
the duplicity is more frequent and ingenious, the 
punishments more acutely shameless, but the un- 
assuaged passions, the brutal enmity, and the un- 
sparing contempt seem unchanged from the primal 
exhibitions of identical tempers. It has been 
called a religious war, which, considering its 
features^ implies in its litigants an unparalleled 
depravity . Of course it was a religious war, but 
it was a bigotry of faith or allegiance or opinion 



Tribe and Class 121 

rooted in Tribal natures, made more vehement in 
their lawlessness by Class pride, and it was too a 
war of adventuring brigands. The inflamed 
madness of the barbarian was there, and the 
embittered scorn of the aristocrat as well. It is 
inconceivable that a phenomenon so incredible, 
to-day, in its wickedness of persecution, in its 
fiendish heartlessness, could have originated in 
natures from which the tribal curse was completely 
expelled. The horrors of the Thirty Years' War 
came from the gratification of personal, or class or 
religious Hate, a very essential tribal emanation. 
In it the unfortunate inhabitants of the ravaged 
lands suffered unexpected,, undeserved desolation. 
The Thirty Years' War was a squabble (of rather 
large dimensions), of Class, with religion as a 
motive force, and with a machinery of action — its 
dynamic units — large gangs of tribal ruffians, and 
throughout, the tribal and the class struggle for 
place was a dominating influence, a meaner substi- 
tute for the primitive racial ambitions of a Canute, 
a Hengist and a Horsa, a Vercingetoric, a Theo- 
doric, a Clovis, a Martel, or a Harold. 

The dominion of the emperor Charles V in the 
16th century in Central Europe was a loosely con- 
nected fabric of States, which the shock of religious 
controversy rapidly disintegrated. It represented 
a group of princes, dioceses, and cities, where, for 
the major part, or entirely, the individual prefer- 
ences of rulers — it might be their convictions — and 
especially the interest of houses, directed public 
conduct to the exclusion of the needs, desires, or 



122 Europe's Handicap — 

happiness of their subjects. The Thirty Years' 
War with its increasing terrors of desolated homes, 
burned towns, and revolting outrages, was quite 
avoidable, had the terms of a possible agreement 
between Catholicism and Protestantism been 
submitted for discussion to the people. One of 
the wisest and most illuminated of historians has 
written; "there is every reason to believe that if 
Germany had possessed anything like a popular 
representation, its voice would have spoken in 
favor of some kind of compromise. There is no 
trace of any mutual hostility between the popula- 
tions of the Catholic and Protestant districts apart 
from their rulers," (S. R. Gardiner). 

The arrogant and unimpeded supremacy over 
personal inheritances constituted an utterly un- 
practical political organization. In the Empire — 
so-called — the Emperor was a shadowy pretence, 
veiled indeed within the jargon of traditions, and 
recognized in the pomposities of coronation rites. 
No such centralization as was accomplished in 
France or England, had been or could be effected. 
All that only was permanently attained when, in 
the 19th century, the fact of a consolidated unified 
Germany threatened the solidarity of Europe it- 
self. Gardiner authoritatively outlines the per- 
plexity; "the immediate vassals of the Empire, in 
fact, were almost independent sovereigns, like the 
Dukes of Normandy in the France of the tenth 
century, or the Dukes of Burgundy in the France 
of the fifteenth century. They quarrelled and 
made war with one another, like the Kings of 



Tribe and Class 123 

England and France. Their own vassals, their 
own peasants, their own towns, could only reach 
the Emperor through them, if anybody thought it 
worth while to reach him at all." The plausible 
rigmarole cujus regio ejus religio was affirmative of 
the aristocratic, the class, judgment, and whether 
it was protestant prince secularizing catholic 
property, or catholic prince supporting catholic 
prelates and bishops, over protestant congrega- 
tions, the fallacy and its injustice were precisely 
identical in each case. 

Again the tribal instincts were invoked, we 
believe, in the fratricidal enmities of Calvinist 
and Lutheran, inasmuch as we attribute much of 
the religious bigotry of Europe, during all of the 
centuries before the last, to the doggedness of 
conviction exasperated by the traits of tribal 
ferocity. 

At the outset of the war there were three leaders, 
the Catholic Duke of Bavaria, the Calvinist 
Prince Christian of Anhalt, and John George the 
Lutheran Elector of Saxony, and these men were 
at variance, as much in their temperaments as in 
their sympathies. The very first act — an act of 
aggression — of Maximilian, Duke of Bavaria, was 
to bring rapidly to a head the slumbering animosi- 
ties of sects, and the flame of dissension rapidly 
ran its tortuous course between the hostile sec- 
tions, flaming high in one place and fed with fuel 
of combative or revolutionary zeal ; less conspicu- 
ous elsewhere, when the temporizing expedients of 
fear or conservatism held it in check. 



124 Europe's Handicap — 

The protestant Union was formed, confronting 
it was the Catholic League. A duke dies, con- 
testants for his place and patronage appear, and 
while both pretenders are Lutherans, a Catholic 
army, under the Duke of Bavaria, marches to 
settle the dispute by seizing the country. The 
french king observes his opportunity, and, under 
the guise of disinterestedness, turns his batteries 
upon Spain. One young pretender has his ears 
boxed, and, infuriated by the insult, renounces 
protestantism, and adopts the catholic faith, while 
the Elector who administered the blow, accepts 
Calvinism as a more emphatic protestant protest. 
In just such accidents of conduct does the resent- 
ment of Class, and the irritability of Tribe precipi- 
tate disaster, where either accentuates the course 
of government. "That immediate war in Ger- 
many did not result from the quarrel is probably 
the strongest possible evidence of the reluctance of 
the German people to break the peace." (Gar- 
diner). Intrigue, plot, compromise, hesitancy, 
threats, blows, darkened the councils of the great, 
with disorder and incertitude, sometimes with 
violence. The people wished no war, profited by 
no war, would have had, upon their collective 
initiative, no war, but — the whole thing in a nut- 
shell — ''the subjects and the rulers had no thoughts 
in common," (Gardiner). And Christian of 
Anhalt, a bellicose calvinist, ceaselessly upset 
every project of a peaceful settlement. There 
was violations, snap judgments, indiscretions, and 
usurpations. 



Tribe and Class 125 

In the parcelling out of the various royal land 
properties, we find the descendants of Ferdinand 
I, brother of Charles V, assigned to them, and the 
archduchy of Austria, the realm of Bohemia and 
Hungary, the Tyrol and Styria, Carinthia, and 
Carniola, figure in the political and religious confu- 
sion of the rapidly tangling threads of this deplor- 
able war. It was a chess-game of policies, a dis- 
sembling of aims, contrivances and counter- 
contrivances, with wavering lines of fidelity, and 
with the chief men at loggerheads over place and 
title. The Jesuits were expelled from Bohemia, 
king Ferdinand felt his dethronement was 
intended, a revolution starts in Prague, and the 
war began. We then consider a phenomenon 
truly tribal or worse. The protestant commander 
Count Ernest of Mansfield led about an army 
which subsisted on pillage. His opponent Buc- 
quoi followed suit, and the people supported both. 
"Starving armies are not particular in their 
methods of supplying their wants. Plunder, 
devastation, and reckless atrocities of every 
kind fell to the lot of the doomed peasants, 
Bucquoi's Hungarians being conspicuous for bar- 
barity." 

There was more swapping and bargaining, and 
the war settled into a headstrong strife with some 
leaders gleefully exclaiming, ^^we have now the 
means of upsetting the world.'' The Dutch began 
to help the protestants, and from a distance Eng- 
land expressed interest. Vienna might have 
fallen before the protestant army but trafficking 



126 Europe's Handicap — 

between its general and the Austrian nobility 
was unsatisfactory. Lutherans and Calvinists 
stumbled against each other, and things grew 
worse, with the bread-winners becoming more and 
more impotent and beggared. Ferdinand was 
made Emperor, but the 3^oung elector of the 
Palatinate was chosen by the Bohemians for their 
king, and the drawn swords were now more sharply 
crossed. Maximilian of Bavaria enters the em- 
broglio, but with a concession — a string we would 
call it — tied to his partisanship. The Turks loom 
up and an actual self-confessed tribesman glides 
in, Bethlen Gabor, protestant prince of Transyl- 
vania, who developed a vicious appetite for all of 
Hungary and Austria, and "in the first days of 
November, his hordes in friendly alliance with the 
Bohemians were burning and plundering round 
the walls of Vienna." 

Then the Lutheran John George, found he had 
no appetite for the success of protestantism, if his 
own glory was dimmed thereby, and contracted 
an agreement with the catholic League. The 
Spanish auxiliaries were next summoned, and the 
Walloon Tilly, a capable man organized an active 
campaign. Frederick who had been rather too 
hastily made King of Bohemia, discovered that the 
privileges of the Bohemian aristocracy to sleep 
late, interfered with the promptness of his 
measures of defence. Tilly won a disturbing 
victory which ended the Bohemian revolution — 
the chiefs perished on the scalTold. And now the 
conflagration spread, and on all sides the en- 



Tribe and Class 127 

venomed flames ate their way into peaceful lands, 
a lurid tempest of desolation. Mansfield, a soldier 
of fortune fought for the protestants, with a flock 
of mercenaries, lured by pay, and indifferent to 
consequences, depraved in their conduct, and 
ravenous in their hunger. "As soon as his men 
had eaten up one part of the country, they must go 
to another, if they were not to die of starvation. 
They obeyed, like the elements, a law of their own, 
quite independent of the wishes or needs of the 
sovereign whose interests they were supposed to 
serve." 

England and Spain were expected to defray 
expenses, and the dreary conflict continued. 
Then came from the south the Margrave of Baden- 
Durlach, "notorious for the skill with which he had 
found excuses for appropriating ecclesiastical 
property, and for defeating legal attempts to 
embarrass him in his proceedings", and a Christian 
of Brunswick an aspiring military hero — a 17th 
century Alaric — who was not embarrassed by con- 
victions, but wanted one thing — money. "Castles, 
towns, farmhouses, were ransacked for the treasure 
of the rich, and the scanty hoard of the poor." 
"Burning masters appear among the regular 
officers of his army; and many a village, unable 
to satisfy his demand, went up in flames, with its 
peaceful industry ruined forever." 

It looked, among the protestant commanders, 
like a military pool for the division of property. 
The imperial forces were winning fast under Tilly. 



128 Europe's Handicap — 

Mansfield fled to Alsace and the Netherlands. 
There was fighting, looting, and an enlarged circle 
of disorder, bringing in some new elements of dis- 
sension — the Lower Saxon Circle. 

The fire-brand Christian met with defeat, and of 
20,000 only 6,000 of his army escaped, and their 
commander made his way into the Netherlands. 
There was again considerable hauling and pulling 
with embassies and messages, but Gardiner bluntly 
states the case, "it was the old story. With the 
Empire and the Diet and the Church in the hands 
of mere partisans, there was nothing to remind 
men of their duty as citizens of a great nation. 
Even the idea of being members of a circle was too 
high to be seriously entertained. The cities strove 
to thrust the burden of defence upon the princes, 
and the princes thrust it back upon the cities. 
The flood was rising rapidly which was to swallow 
them all". 

And now came the outbreak of tribal issues. 
England and France had claims and purposes — 
with James I in the former role and with the 
superlative, designing, intrepid, and forecasting 
Richelieu in the latter — then Christian, king of 
Denmark, and the challenging and noble Gustavus 
Adolphus of Sweden. The complications of politi- 
cal and personal motives drew them into the 
eff"ervescing cauldron of disputes, alarms, and 
reprisals. But to add the requisite touch of law- 
lessness — as if it was not all barbarous enough — a 
mercenary again, of a type more recondite and 



Tribe and Class 129 

distinguished than Mansfield, he in whose mouth 
Schiller puts the words; 

As the sun, 
Ere it is risen, sometimes paints image 
In the atmosphere, so often do the spirits 
Of great events stride on before the 

events, 
And in to-day already walks to-morrow, 

rose imposingly over the horizon of events. 

Wallenstein climbing upward with a pretty 
well formed expectation of higher things, and a 
complacent conclusion that politics was a better 
mistress to serve than religion, was asking for a 
united and strong empire, with the Emperor as an 
absolute ruler. Wallenstein won repeatedly 
against a freshened protestant coalition, and 
Christian of Denmark was willing to give up 
Silesia, but the enemy insisted on larger conces- 
sions and Holstein was the price of peace. Thus 
a new terror assumed more and more ominous 
dimensions, as Wallenstein's victories grew, for a 
a grandiose conception of Empire was rapidly 
shaping itself not only in the mind of that extrava- 
gant schemer, but in the minds of his officers; his 
"army threatened to establish itself upon the 
ruins of the authority of the princes and the 
electors, and to set up a military despotism of the 
most intolerable kind. Every where Wallen- 
stein's recruiting officers were beating their drums. 
Quiet episcopal cities in the south of Germany, 
which hoped to have seen the last of their troubles, 



130 Europe's Handicap — 

when Mansfield vanished westward, out of Alsace 
in 1622, found themselves suddenly selected as a 
trysting-place for some new regiment. Rough 
men poured in from every direction to be armed, 
clothed, lodged, and fed at their expense. The 
alarming doctrine that the army was to support 
itself, that men were to be raised for the purpose 
not of fighting the enemy, but of pressing contribu- 
tions out of friends, caused universal consterna- 
tion. Wallenstein's officers too, had been heard 
to talk with military frankness about pulling down 
princes and electors, and making a real sovereign 
of the Emperor." 

The siege of Straslund proved to be a turning 
point, and from its unreduced walls Wallenstein 
led his army away, although he had sworn to 
make it as flat as the table he smote with his hand. 
Denmark was weaned from her natural ally 
Sweden, through diplomacy, accompanied by a 
successful bribe to the King of Denmark, who 
recovered his hereditary possessions, while Maxi- 
milian of Bavaria and Ferdinand, made a fresh 
dicker, and the pressure of the repression increased 
for the protestants. The french, guided by the 
astute Richelieu, were aroused by the danger of a 
too powerful neighbor, albeit of the same faith, 
and were quietly fomenting the resistance which 
might curb his power. Spain also came into 
collision with France in Italy. There was the 
usual espionage, envies, and state complications, 
controlled by selfish motives or the whims of 
individual ambitions. 



Tribe and Class 131 

Wallenstein's army swelled into an alarming 
size and a clamor of dismay arose to the Emperor 
from those who divined its irrepressible purposes 
which meant probably a coup of such sweeping 
energy as to leave nothing as it was. Wallen- 
stein's mind was inflamed by strange visions, and 
his concupiscent eye lit upon Rome itself, as he 
exclaimed "it is a hundred years since Rome has 
been plundered and it is richer now than ever"; 
and all the time the excesses of the soldiers were 
turning Germany into a grave-yard. "Cases had 
occurred in which starving wretches had main- 
tained life by devouring human flesh. A woman 
had even been known toieed upon her child." 

Wallenstein was frankly felt to be a fire-brand, 
some irreconcilable innovator whose plans con- 
templated an upheaval, and a new creation. 
There was remonstrance and protest, and 
Richelieu, not altogether relishing the pan- 
germanic crusade, assisted with alacrity for the 
overthrow of Wallenstein. And now Sweden, 
represented by that astonishing man Gustavus 
Adolphus, became engaged in the vast embroil- 
ment, and this last new leader was helped by the 
cameleon-minded Richelieu who found in this 
fresh agent, encouraging support for his schemes — 
for the great cardinal had but one underlying and 
coercing motive in his apparently circuitous and 
fickle manoeuvres, the establishment and exaltation 
of the Monarchy in France. His scheme at the 
Juncture when Adolphus came to his hand was to 
keep Ferdinand restrained, or at least restricted. 



132 Europe's Handicap — 

Magdeburg was besieged by the imperialists, 
and fell, presenting a picture in its sufferings which 
would have shamed the most ruthless savage; 
"scarcely had the first rush taken place over the 
walls when, either intentionally or by accident, 
some of the houses were set on fire. In the excite- 
ment of plunder or of terror no one thought of 
stopping the flames. The conquerors, angered by 
the thought that their booty was being snatched 
away from before their eyes by an enemy more 
irresistible than themselves, were inflamed almost 
to madness. Few could meet that infuriated 
soldiery and live. Whilst every form of death, 
and of outrage, worse than death, was encountered 
in the streets, the shrieks of the wretched victims 
were overpowered by the roaring of the flames. 
In a few hours the great city, the virgin fortress 
which had resisted Charles V. and Wallenstein, 
with the exception of the Cathedral and a few 
houses around it, was reduced to a blackened ruin 
beneath which lay the calcined bones of men, of 
tender women, and of innocent babes." 

Tilly the imperial general was then employed in 
coercing John George, the Lutheran Elector of 
Saxony, threatening worse things to Leipzig, than 
had visited Magdeburg. In this extremity 
Gustavus Adolphus was summoned by the Elector, 
and promptly obeyed. The battle of Breitenfeld 
defeated the ring of authority that had overridden 
the wishes of a majority of the people, but intro- 
duced however a fresh motion of protestant self- 
assertion, while the discarded Wallenstein was 



Tribe and Class 133 

quite willing to go over to the enemy, and the 
veering Richelieu, watching the sinking of the 
scales, again devoted his efforts to minimize the 
new success. Tilly was killed in battle, the 
Swedish king kept on his victorious course. But 
Wallenstein was restored to power as the best 
possible substitute to stem the gothic invasion, 
and true to his precedents he was not slow in 
making his terms expensive. 

The war went on with wide spread misery mark- 
ing its eventful way. Nuremburg endured starva- 
tion and pestilence, and Tilly "established him- 
self firmly in Saxony, plundering and burning on 
every side". The battle of Lutzen was a victory 
for the Swedes, but purchased all too dearly. 
Gustavus Adolphus was killed. Germany fell 
apart; the dislocating tendency of groups, the 
divergent interests of princes, the tireless intrigues 
of policy, denied to it coherence, forbade even the 
attempt to secure it. Later hands were to weld 
it into a whole, wherein indeed the tribal fires of 
pugnacity ceaselessly burned, and were all the more 
formidable because of their unital convergence. 
Wallenstein was regarded as a danger, and sud- 
denly expiated his recklessness of aspiration in 
death. He was assassinated. Imperialistic vic- 
tories followed, and the increasing intrusion of the 
hand of the french cardinal, while Spain and 
Sweden contributed disastrous elements of selfish- 
ness and sedition. As Gardiner acutely explains 
all ideals were lost; "the great quarrel of principle 
had merged into a mere quarrel between the 



134 Europe's Handicap — 

Houses of Austria and Bourbon, in which the shred 
of principle which still remained in the question of 
the rights of the southern Protestants, was almost 
entirely disregarded." 

And the horrors, the outrages, the inhumanities 
multiplied. One illustration is enough to expose 
the depthless misery of the time ; "when Augsburg 
was besieged by the imperialists, after their victory 
at Nordlingen, it contained an industrious popula- 
tion of 70,000 souls. After a siege of seven 
months, 10,000 living beings, wan and haggered 
with famine, remained to open the gates to the 
conquerors, and the great commercial city of the 
Fuggers dwindled down into a country town." 

More pronouncedly became the insatiable rival- 
ries of potentate and policies. France and Spain, 
with a minor participation of England, wrangled 
together over the blood stained fields of Germany, 
and hopelessly tore its too loosely aggregated 
sections apart; "the nobler motives which had 
imparted a glow to the work of Tilly and Gustavus, 
and which even lit up the profound selfishness of 
Wallenstein, flickered and died away, till the final 
disruption of the Empire was accomplished amidst 
the strivings and passions of heartless and un- 
principled men." (Gardiner). France used the 
military successes of Gustavus for its purposes, and 
of a soldier of talent and ambition, Bernard of 
Weimar, his successor, and Spain, the prejudices, 
affiliations, and resources of Ferdinand. 

The war, now waged, concerned possession of 
Alsace and Lorraine, that rose as Gardiner avers 



Tribe and Class 135 

"into primary importance, not because, as in our 
own days, Germany needed a bulwark against 
France, or France needed a bulwark against Ger- 
many, but because Germany was not strong 
enough to prevent these territories from becoming 
the highway of intercourse between Spain and the 
Spanish Netherlands." Spain won in the south, 
as against France and the Dutch; France was 
invaded, and Paris placed in the strange peril of 
subjugation. On the north the Swedes under 
Baner devastated North Germany, and later both 
Bernard and Baner fought the french for the con- 
quest of Alsace, and when it was won the french 
government ordered its. relinquishment into its 
own hands fearing the triumphant Swede might 
start an independent realm in Alsace, too near 
itself. It was refused by Bernard who in 1639 
died of a fatal disease, and the fortresses of Alsace 
and Breisgau passed into the possession of the 
French. Bernard's army came under the control 
of french officers, and fought over the distracted 
and ruined Germany. The french were winning, 
and a Spanish fleet chased by the Dutch, took 
refuge in english waters, where, for a time, in- 
terned, as it were, its destruction became the sub- 
ject of diplomatic barters, a most signal illustra- 
tion of that Curse of Class and Tribe which this 
essay is intended to emphasize; "Charles of 
England saw in the occurrence an opportunity to 
make a bargain with one side or the other. He 
offered to abandon the Spaniards if the French 
would agree to restore his nephew, Charles Lewis, 



136 Europe's Handicap — 

the Son of his sister Elizabeth, to his inheritance 
in the Palatinate. He offered to protect the 
Spaniards, if Spain would pay him the large sum 
which he would want for the armaments needed to 
bid defiance to France." 

The upshot of the whole business was that 
Richelieu fooled Charles, and the Dutch, indiffer- 
ent to consequences, and utterly contemptuous of 
the claim of England's neutrality, dashed in, and 
sank or fired the Spanish vessels as they lay at 
anchor. The french successes continued, and 
Richelieu with the adamantine resolve of solidify- 
ing the Monarchy on a throne of absolute inde- 
structibility, kept on playing the pawns on the 
political chess-board with almost unbroken profit 
to his policy. Richelieu and Louis XIII died, and 
the war continued, while the new king, a child who 
was to embody the most imperious conception of 
kingdom, ascended the throne. A great victory 
at Rocroy under Enghien swept into the hands of 
France more lands, while Maximilian, in Germany 
itself, contended with the french commanders 
auspiciously, and the Swedes struggled indus- 
triously in the north. 

The battle of Freiberg — one of the bloodiest of 
the frightful war — was fought out, and that of 
Nordlingen followed. A new military genius, in 
the mind and person of the frenchman Turenne 
rose to the ascendancy of the french arms. Slip- 
ping past the enemy, he entered the very heart of 
Bavaria; the Bavarians were defeated, and 
Ferdinand the III saw that his cause was lost, the 



Tribe and Class 137 

imperialists were ground between two millstones, 
the Swedes on the north and the triumphant 
frenchmen on the south, and there was nothing to 
do but sue for peace, while a worn-out, demoralized, 
and pauperized country, the victim of innumerable 
private animosities, petty schemes of aggrandize- 
ment and the pervasive craft of weazel eyed diplo- 
macy, waited sorrowful and discouraged. The 
treaty of Westphalia closed the Thirty Years' War, 
and what was the condition of Germany at its 
termination? Read the pathetic and eloquent 
words of its best historian (Gardiner) "whatever 
life there was under that deadly blast of war had 
been attracted to the camps. The strong man 
who had lost his all turned soldier that he might 
be able to rob others in turn. The young girl, 
who in better times would have passed on to a life 
of honorable wedlock with some youth who had 
been the companion of her childhood in the sports 
around the village fountain, had turned aside, for 
very starvation, to a life of shame, in the train of 
one or the other of the armies by which her home 
had been made desolate. In the later years of the 
war it was known that a body of 40,000 fighting 
men drew along with it a loathsome following of 
no less than 140,000 men, women, children, con- 
tributing nothing to the efficiency of the army, and 
all of them living at the expense of the miserable 
peasants, who still contrived to hold on to their 
ruined fields. If these were taken, to live they 
must steal what yet remained to be stolen; they 
must devour, with the insatiable hunger of locusts, 
what yet remained to be devoured." 



138 Europe's Handicap — 

And the moral degradation, the loss of social 
equity and justice, was inexpressible; "courts 
were crowded with feather-brained soldiers whose 
highest ambition was to bedeck themselves in a 
splendid uniform, and to copy the latest fashion or 
folly which was in vogue at Paris or Versailles. 
In the country district a narrow-minded gentry, 
without knowledge or culture, domineered over all 
around, and strove to exact the uttermost farthing 
from the peasant in order to keep up the outward 
appearance of rank. The peasant whose father 
had been bullied by marauding soldiers dared not 
life up his head against the exactions of the squire. 
The burden of the general impoverishment fell 
heavily upon his shoulders. In all ranks life was 
meaner, poorer, harder than it had been at the 
beginning of the century." 

The treaty of Westphalia put an end to a war 
which apart from religion had been instigated by 
tribal motives, indissolubly bound up with class 
interests, wherein the land most involved in its 
actual execution was overrun by foreigners, for 
Wallenstein was a Slavonian, Tilly a Walloon, 
Gustavus a Swede, and Richelieu a Frenchman. 
The wretchedness of the European system is 
further suddenly accentuated to the reader when, 
as the curtain falls, he learns that the Treaty of 
Westphalia also coincided with the termination of 
an EIGHTY years' war in the Netherlands, waged 
against freedom by the intractable bigotry or pride 
of a king, whetted to a degree of ravenous cruelty, 
almost unascertainable elsewhere than in the 



Tribe and Class 139 

practices of barbarians, by the tribal instinct of 
hostile extermination. One aspect — as we shall 
see — of European tribal feeling is Bigotry. 

But war still lingered, as if, nourished for ages 
on the blood-saturated fields of Europe, like some 
overgrown vampire feeding too nutritiously on 
the juices of its victims, it was clogged with its own 
satiety, and could not raise its sluggish wings to 
visit other but less distinguished banquets. Spain 
and France fought on, Cromwell entered the con- 
tests, and the end came with the surrender of 
Spain, in an unequal combat, when Dunkirk was 
was given over to England, and Gravelines, 
Oudenarde, Ypres, with the cities of Roussillon, 
Landrecies and Avesnes, the provinces of Alsace 
and Lorraine and Artois, were incorporated in the 
kingdom of France. 

And turning now to the history of the reign of 
Louis XIV for which the labors of Richelieu and 
Colbert had prepared the groundwork of national 
greatness, as properly estimated in public happi- 
ness, the triumphs of peace and toleration, the 
elevation of subject, and the dissemination of the 
wholesome influences of enriching industry — 
turning to this reign, inaugurated upon the very 
close of the Thirty Years' War, let us see how 
completely Class Domination, as visualized in an 
absolute king, precipitated fresh miseries on the 
unfortunate and ever bickering nations of Europe. 
We see also the irrepressible greed of family, and 
the subjection of national welfare to the barren 
claims of Class magnificence, for Louis had given 



140 Europe's Handicap — 

his hand to the sister of Philip IV of Spain, who, 
for so splendid an alliance, was to renounce all 
claims to the Spanish crown, to which she became 
heiress upon the death of Charles II her brother. 
And this marriage — a state affair of interested 
motives — was to bring in its train more distress to 
the class-cursed denizens of Europe. 

The contemplation of the reign of Louis XIV 
leaves a most extraordinary impression of luxuri- 
ance, luxuriance in mental products, in Artistic 
wealth, in prodigal expenditures, luxuriance in the 
crowded annals of its seventy two years of commo- 
tion, war, persecution and indulgence, luxuriance 
in pomposities and adulations, luxuriance in 
egotisms and parade, and in wicked brutality of 
power, where indeed the tribal qualities of aggres- 
sion, cruelty, vindictiveness, — all masked under 
an enamel of wit and elegance, and courage too — 
are mingled with the vanities of Class, and that 
again is swallowed up in the blinding effulgence of 
a Tyrant King. The Curse of Class, as embodied 
in this ultimate apotheosis of an unrestrained 
monarch, is vividly realized in Louis XIV, who 
filled his years with impieties of conduct, afflicted 
his people with despair and want, and sent thou- 
sands to their graves in wanton wars or tortured 
them with pain. The last monstrousness of an 
immeasurable incredible vanity abided in this 
man, as the poison of the Belladonna abides in its 
resplendent blossoms. His reign expresses all the 
ruinous consequences of the Class idea, because the 
quintessence of that idea is a foreordained and an 



Tribe and Class 141 

irrellnquishable personal superiority, by reason of 
PLACE. In Louis XIV that idea culminated in 
an exorbitance that insulted God and Man. The 
egotism was so sublime, that before its dazzling 
effrontery criticism or reproach almost seems 
childish; pageantry disguised its hideousness and 
talent its coarseness. 

The opening years of Louis XIV reign, during 
the regency of Anne of Austria were violently dis- 
turbed by civil strife wherein, apart from the 
natural unwillingness of the people to endure fiscal 
exactions, the subversive petulance and presump- 
tion of the nobility, under the suppressive neglect 
of the Regent and her favorite Cardinal Mazarin, 
contributed to the intestinal confusion of the state. 

The Wars of the Fronde were serious, and pro- 
longed, though curiously also characterized by 
gasconade and humorous fooling, and the princes 
of the realm, fighting on both sides, formed and 
dissolved cabals, whose shifting phases reflected 
their changing opportunities of advantage. 
Madame de Chevreuse plotted the assassination 
of Mazarin, the Prince of Conde enlisted at first 
with the Parliament, but combined later with the 
Court, and once there his pretensions became 
intolerable. He formed a new faction of discon- 
tented nobles, and, through the sudden afifiliation 
of a group of intrigues with the Court, was arrested 
and imprisoned. The great general Turenne, with 
a Spanish force as allies, always favorably disposed 
to add confusion to french politics, entered the 
civil war, and was defeated. Then there was more 



142 Europe's Handicap — 

shifting of sides among the principals, Turenne 
assisted the Royalists; there was treachery, 
desertion, and infinite duplicity, with Conde 
finally an exile, and Mazarin and the Court 
triumphant. 

In all of this turmoil of affairs the distinct im- 
pelling motives were Class perpetuation and 
exaltation. It was the revolt of nobles against 
growing absolutism in the monarchy, but whether 
it was king or noble, the struggle emphasized no 
principle of action disinterestedly patriotic, but 
only the superlative demands of pride, of ambition, 
of place. Louis XI V came of age, and closing every 
avenue of remonstrance, became the State also, 
which in reality was a more fortunate conclusion 
to these conflicts, as the immoderate injustice of 
Class, embodied in one man, became thereby more 
conspicuous, and as a historic fact was more 
vulnerable. 

The aspect of the reign of Louis XIV, which it 
is desirable to exhibit or lay stress upon, for the 
purpose of this thesis, is the utterly abandoned 
and lawless manner in which this man — exempted 
by the traditions of Class as he was permitted to 
interpret them, and he stopped at nothing, deriv- 
ing his place and functions from Heaven itself — 
threw Europe into confusion, and made its coun- 
tries military camps and its fields and cities 
slaughter-pens. 

When Philip the Fourth of Spain died, the 
french king at once claimed Brabant, Flanders, 
and the Spanish possessions of the Low countries; 



Tribe and Class 143 

so hopelessly was Europe cursed with the inde- 
fatigable cupidity of its rulers, a cupidity quite 
discernable to-day. France did not need this 
extension, the grounds of Louis' claims were most 
questionable, as his wife had renounced hfer inherit- 
ance, upon marrying the french monarch. But the 
immoderate violence of his despotic will, and his 
self-complacent greed, had no considerations for 
a plea of reason or humanity, nor indeed, in the 
interminable broils, collisions, and plots of Euro- 
pean rulers and governments, have they ever 
availed much. Louis was successful, through the 
brilliant work of the Prince of Conde, and "Spain 
surrendered to France all^ her conquests on the 
Sambre, the Scheldt, the Scarpe, and the Lys, 
together with Bergues and Furnes on the sea- 
coast; France restored Franche-Conte, but in a 
defenceless state, its principal fortresses having 
been dismantled." 

Louis was incensed with the Dutch Republic 
for its interference, and while he signed the treaty 
of Aix-la-Chapelle with one hand, he held the 
other ready to strike the offending republicans, 
whose very pretensions to freedom insufferably 
vexed him. Intrigue as usual in Europe — the so- 
called diplomacy of its greatly overrated states- 
men — accomplished the capture of Charles II for 
Louis' purposes, and Holland was invaded — the 
king of England's price for his treachery was 
$600,000 — and the prospects of the french king 
looked very bright. The germans became in- 
volved — and here again secret promises were 



144 Europe's Handicap — 

quite publicly and flagrantly broken — Spain fol- 
lowed, and a European war was under way. 
Louis' general Turenne performed prodigies, and 
totally discomfited the germans, while the Prince 
of Conde and William of Orange heaped up the 
battlefield of Seneffe, with over 20,000 corpses. 
The contest raged on land and sea. Six years of 
fluctuating success on either side, left the french 
king in the ascendency, and the Peace of Nimeguen 
was signed after Louis suddenly assaulted and 
carried the cities of Ghent and Ypres, which 
confirmed his paramount importance in the 
settlement. There was a little more blood- 
letting, and France gained large concessions from 
Spain, who paid practically for the peace. The 
whole acerbity and atrocious egoism of Class, 
blazed forth, after this, in the deified potentate. 
As excellently related in The Student's France, 
"his courtiers worshipped him as a demi-god; 
foreign governments regarded him with servile 
awe; and it is not wonderful that in this proud 
zenith of his fortunes he should have shown him- 
self little disposed to practice moderation and 
forbearance. The conclusion of peace produced 
no abatement in his projects of aggressive domina- 
tion; on the contrary, he took advantage of his 
position to push his arbitrary encroachments, 
beyond all bounds of reason and wise policy." 
Tribal covetousness raged in his nature, and the 
outrageously impudent Chambres de Reunion, 
were created, for the express purpose of forcing 
new claims upon his intimidated neighbors. 



Tribe and Class 145 

Twenty towns were added in this way to his realm, 
and the free city of Strasburg, made almost 
invulnerable by the genius of Vauban, became the 
eastern bulwark of France. 

Of course these depredations started new coali- 
tions, and the Dutch States, Sweden, Spain, and 
the German Empire attempted to stem the un- 
governable tide of the french usurpations. Un- 
opposed he trampled upon all rights, invaded, 
seized, confiscated, and bullied, until patience and 
even timidity became restive and belligerent. 
The truce of Ratisbon for twenty years, was 
arranged, which of course meant nothing else to 
any body, but a breathing spell to prepare more 
undeserved sufferings, for the abashed and help- 
less people. The abominable profligate then 
began his unreasonably, viciously wicked and 
hatefully cruel persecution of the protestants at 
the instigation of a mistress. The dragonnades 
began their atrocities, the conversions, extorted by 
the infliction of every bodily torture known to 
human butchery upon the naked bodies of men and 
women, encouragingly mounted into tens of 
thousands; the Edict of Nantes was revoked, and 
this wretched and inexplicable cynosure of fame 
and infamy felt no remorse, for, as Guizot has 
written, ''he had dispeopled his kingdom, reduced 
to exile, despair, or falsehood fifteen hundred 
thousand of his subjects, but the memory of the 
persecutions inflicted upon the protestants, did 
not trouble him ; they were for him rather a pledge 
of his salvation and of his acceptance before God." 



146 Europe's Handicap — 

It was not long, before the inevitable revulsion 
against these outrages assumed form, and one too 
of imposing dimensions. Europe was still to be 
torn with conflict, by reason of the intolerable 
personal direction of national issues, and the 
almost ineradicable vice of tribal instincts in rulers 
and in people. The League of Augsburg (1686) 
brought together, in a new coalition, another and 
hostile sphere of influence; Spain, Sweden, 
Bavaria, Saxony, England, Holland, and the 
Palatinate. Then, incensed at his threatened 
losses, the french king ordered his generals to 
destroy the Palatinate. It was done. The fires of 
the royal incendiary lit up the fair provinces with 
the glare of burning cities; Heidelberg, Manheim, 
Spires, Worms, Oppenheim, Bingen, were reduced 
to ruins, and a homeless population wandered 
despairing and desperate over the land, which had 
been blooming with orchards or laden with har- 
vests; one hundred thousand abject creatures, in 
whose hearts entered the inextinguishable fires of 
vindictive hate, or who became embruited by the 
bitter anguish of unmerited afflictions. 

The Grand Alliance was formed, and seven years 
more of war, full of wretchedness, of wasted lives, 
and annihilated fortunes, suffered absolutely for no 
other reason than the rebuke and retention within 
bounds of a tribal maniac, brought Europe and 
especially France, to the last extremes of exhaus- 
tion. The treaty of Ryswick was signed by the 
great signatories of the Alliance, and England was 
guaranteed the non-molestation by France of her 



Tribe and Class 147 

new king William III. Louis XIV endured some 
wholesome pangs of wounded vanity, but his mind 
turned with resignation and hope towards a new 
scheme of plunder and spoliation. Charles II of 
Spain was dying, childless. The french king 
intended to dictate the disposition of his property. 
There were other aspirants to the same task, and 
the mischief of this rivalry of houses or dynasties, 
with all the inseparable subterfuges, and wire- 
pullings, was significantly shown. Three candi- 
dates appeared, and with approved justifications 
for their claims, which cannot detain these pages, 
but the upshot of course was a new war — that 
most infallible product of-European politics — and 
the War of the Spanish Succession broke out, and 
intrigue, the balancing of interests, and the coolest 
imaginable bargainings between governments over 
property, not theirs, illustrated anew the be- 
nighted position of the populations of Europe. 

And all this culminating in a repudiation of 
solemn — solemnity with a king seems generally 
to mean just dignified shamming — promises, for 
Louis broke his word flat and finally, and England 
was accused of treachery, and this done, as always, 
with the intention of preserving the Balance of 
Power, a semi-mythical entity, which is so often 
adjusted and never stays put. It is a phrase and a 
policy which most forcibly suggests an organized 
group of cut-throats, who never feel sure of each 
other, or of TRIBES whose boundaries and 
behavior are precisely such as their strength en- 
ables them to hold, or their comfort influences 
them to exhibit. 



148 Europe's Handicap — 

The War of the Spanish Succession has left the 
records of four great battles — Ramillies, Blenheim, 
Oudenarde, Malplaquet — the illustration of a 
military genius — the english general the Duke 
of Marlborough — and m^arked, practically, the 
term of life of a man who accumulated horrors 
upon horrors, for the gratification of his pride, his 
own unique Class. 

The Thirty Years' War, and the Reign of Louis 
XIV, are sufhciently removed from the earliest 
stages of tribal culture, to awaken the expectation 
that the psychic — if that expression is correct — 
features of their periods, would be vastly con- 
trasted with the primitive times of rude assault 
and of devastating inroads. In the material 
beauty of their civilization, of course they are, and 
in the products of mind and of imagination, but 
surely the tribal instincts of aggression have not 
been extirpated, while added to these, and, in a 
more or less complicated fashion influencing them, 
is the willfulness of Class, in groups of men or in 
one man, separated from their fellow beings by an 
artifice of spurious promotion. 

This is unquestionable, and were we to traverse 
more widely, following a longer range of time, the 
history of Europe every one know^s that it pre- 
sents the bitter conflict of the tyrant and the 
freeman, with the slow emergence into plainer and 
plainer sight, of the inalienable rights of man to 
Life, Liberty, and Happiness. But the conten- 
tion of this essay would decline into an unwished 
for commonplaceness, if we did not show, that 



Tribe and Class 149 

while all the time civic conditions were ameliorated, 
yet intrinsically the tribal and the class residues — 
if we may so denominate them — of feeling and of 
action remain, and in the Europe of to-day the un- 
democratic spirit of both animate the governors 
and the governed. We have in some excitatory 
sentences already alluded to this. Let us now 
pass to centuries nearer our own, when, with per- 
haps the exception of Russia — at all eras ap- 
parently irredeemable — the torture chamber, the 
rack, the stake, the pillory, the dungeon, the 
thumb-screw, starvation, have been abolished 
everywhere, and have become for us inconceivable 
horrors of an almost inconceivable age, and see 
whether we do not still find, certainly in the 
eighteenth century and in the nineteenth the 
clear evidence of a state of mind — tribal or class — 
which the spirit of America in the wholesale, not 
particularized in a few, utterly repudiates. 

But first, is the tribal spirit discoverable in the 
people themselves as the executants of that spirit. 
The armies, the populations of the time who 
witnessed and condoned the outrages we have 
reviewed, were themselves guilty of complicity; 
they too were as tribal as the instigators of the 
previous crimes against themselves. When, with 
tables turned they too held power, was its use any 
more merciful? 

The French Revolution was the harvest of the 
unthinking government of Louis XIV, and it is 
the meaning of our thesis to believe that its 
atrocities were not purely the excesses of retribu- 



150 Europe's Handicap — 

tion, the rage of retaliation, but showed that the 
unfortunate subjects of ruthless kings and nobles, 
were afiflicted with the same violence of feeling 
that distorted normal humanity in their perse- 
cutors and lords. There were two moments in 
French history when the common people as we say 
came Into the control of affairs through revolution. 
The first was a temporary and restricted event the 
Jacquerie in 1358, and the second was the French 
Revolution in 1789. Both periods were marked 
by savage violence. 

In the first the condition of the peasantry had 
reached a state almost beggaring description. 
The endless fighting between the English and the 
French, with all the commingled treachery of 
counts and dukes, pretenders and aspirants, had 
wasted the country, and made wild animals of the 
hunted and ravaged inhabitants decimated by 
famine, pestilence, and the sword. There was a 
propitious interval, and a band of peasants, most 
ironically called Good fellows {Jacques Bonhom- 
mes), because of their long suffering, took up arms, 
and soon swelled their numbers to the respectable 
size of five thousand, and seized some castles and 
promptly proceeded to slay all of the inmates, 
omitting, we believe, as the nobles in their turn 
did not omit, the aggravating circumstance of 
torture. It was all barbarous and cruel, but its 
mitigation in the average estimate of men will be 
found in the fact that those who committed the 
crime, had themselves undergone the extremes of 
undeserved misery inflicted upon them by the 



Tribe and Class 151 

barbarities of Class. The incident proves nothing 
for our purpose, except that both lord and subject 
were savages, the former particularly so as the 
king of Navarre having captured a chieftain of the 
peasants, one by name William Karle or Callet, 
"had him beheaded, wearing a trivet of red-hot 
iron, by way of a crown", while, with much indif- 
ference, seven thousand of the rest were put to 
death. Here the cruelty of the peasants might be 
justly attributed to the natural promptings of 
revenge. Any mob to-day would do quite the 
same thing to their oppressors, if they had endured 
at their hands the miseries of the poor french 
peasants. There was certainly nothing to choose 
between the educated nobles and their unedu- 
cated subjects, in the matter either of decency or 
mercy. 

But was it not different in the later outbreak, 
when the King of France was dethroned by a 
constitutional assembly, and the period — late in 
the eighteenth century — was characterized by 
learning, the spread of enlightenment, and the 
movement was national and intelligent? Cer- 
tainly it passed through decreasing stages of 
moderation, and culminated in wholesale murders, 
contrived too in the provinces with disgraceful 
aggravations. The first friends of the Revolution 
as Southey, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Moor, Camp- 
bell, Crabbe, in England, soon became ashamed 
of its extravagances, and might have been willing 
to assent to Burk's fine accusation; "they have 
made no sacrifices to their projects than their 



152 Europe's Handicap — 

shoe-buckles, whilst they were imprisoning their 
king, murdering their fellow-citizens, and bathing 
in tears and plunging in poverty and distress 
thousands of worthy men and worthy families. 
Their cruelty has not even been the base result of 
fear. It has been the effect of their sense of per- 
fect safety, in authorizing, treasons, robberies, 
rapes, assassinations, slaughters and burnings 
throughout their harassed land." Now it is evi- 
dent that the men who consummated the later 
and worse aspects of the French Revolution were 
men of civilized experiences, and had met such 
conjunctions of circumstance as to save them 
from any of the physical miseries endured by the 
peasants of the Jacquery. Except as they 
mentally rebelled at the perversion of justice in 
the abominable servitude of the masses to an 
aristocratic minority, they had no reason to feel 
the exacerbations of personal retaliations. But 
what did they do? 

"Up to the law of Prairial (10th June) there had 
been 1220 executions in Paris. You may add to 
these a hundred or so at the most for the period 
before the Terror. In the seven weeks succeeding 
the law there were 1376" (Belloc). There was 
plenty of slaughtering elsewhere, in the provinces, 
and in other cities than Paris. Barrere ordered 
the extermination of the inhabitants of Lyons, and 
because the scaffold involved delay — a mechanical 
retardation purely — they were mowed down with 
musketry. Toulon, Caen, Marseilles, Bordeaux, 
underwent similar castigation. At Orleans the 



Tribe and Class 153 

leading citizens were slain. There was the 
butchery in the streets of Paris on the Second of 
September, when the horrible "jail-deliveries" 
were perpetrated and probably 2,000 persons, 
among them the most innocent, harmless, and 
defenceless, were massacred by cut-throats. And 
all of this came about, not because of mere mad- 
ness, a delirium of fear; the men who figured in 
these awful murders who permitted and ignored 
them, were sane enough, and their personal condi- 
tion suggested no necessary resort to retaliation 
for their emotional satisfaction. Read the names. 
Among the Girondists Vergniaud, Brissot, 
Gaudet, Louvet, Petion^ Barbaroux, Roland. 
Among the Jacobins, Robespierre, St. Just, 
Couthon, Collot d'Herbois, Carnot, Cambon, 
Barrere, Fouche, besides the legalists, Danton, 
Camille Desmoulins, Philippeaux, Lacroix, Wes- 
termann. These men were most diversely tuned 
in temperament, most oppositely equipped in 
talent, and some or most of them enjoyed the 
indulgences of life, but, their passions aroused, 
they became TRIBAL, and on the wave, before 
the pressure, of the resuscitated barbarism of their 
natures, the original ferocity of the Celt and of the 
Goth reasserted itself, as it did more implacably 
in the populace. Thus the acts of a people inau- 
gurating the most stupendous revolution Europe 
has known against the perpetuated domination of 
Class, bore the impress — Nay were the replication 
of the savageries of Clovis. 

Was it not true that, as De Seze the counsel of 



154 Europe's Handicap — 

the king said before the king's condemnation to 
the guillotine; "the people wished that a dis- 
astrous tax should be abolished, and Louis 
abolished it; the people desired the abolition of 
servitude and Louis abolished it; solicited reforms 
and he made them ; the people wished to change the 
laws and he consented to the change; the people 
wished that millions of Frenchmen should recover 
their rights, and he restored them; the people 
wished for liberty, and he bestowed it on 
them"? 

It is accepted that the frightful occurrences of 
the French Revolution were best calculated, in the 
procedure to subsequent events, to administer 
that decisive shock to a rooted and dishonored 
system, which shook from off a palsied continent 
the illusion of a name, and the continuation of an 
injurious convention, but the actors in these 
atrocities were not aiming at a philosophical solu- 
tion of their predicament. They became tribal, 
and repeated in their violence the tribal outrages 
that for thousands of years had marked the stream 
of events in Europe, and Europe cannot — any- 
more than a wolf, or a lion, a tiger, or any other 
rapacious and untamed wild beast — escape the 
natural laws of Heredity, and those of Environ- 
ment. Human nature indeed is a better zoological 
product than the nature of wild beasts, but it is not 
so much better that it can defy the absolute biol- 
ogy of living things, unless conforming to higher 
laws than those of biology, w^hen by an act of 
WILL it eradicates its inherited nature and rati- 



Tribe and Class 155 

fies that act of will by obliterating its environment, 
and that means, for Europe, simply a social and 
political REVOLUTION. 

The french revolutionists were not driven to 
their acts by necessity, nor by terror — though 
terror doubtless added a bitterer edge to their 
tribal instincts — nor by memory; they started 
the work of a popular conquest, and they 
attempted to carry their conquests over 
Europe in tribal fashion and like all tribal con- 
quests it was accompanied with outrage, with the 
frenzy of destructiveness. The tribal nature was 
shown by Royalist and Republican in their con- 
tests with each other; . the Vendean armies 
massacred the republicans and the Republicans 
devastated Vendee by fire and sword. The intent 
of extermination that animated all tribal warfare 
animated them, for fundamentally WAR is the 
expression of the tribal state, and unless sophisti- 
cated by restraints, springing from higher motives, 
means Death and Destruction. What else can 
it mean? 

And after the French Revolution — salutary and 
desirable as it was — came a tribal chieftain 
Napoleon Bonaparte, the most brilliant, daring, 
and genius-endowed chieftain of his class; with 
whom was no shadow of turning before the re- 
morseless necessities of CONQUEST. Now con- 
quest is an intelligible, intellectual motive, and the 
great generals as Caesar, Hannibal, Alexander, 
may have had political reasons, wedded to 
grandiose dreams of universal dominion, with, 



156 Europe's Handicap — 

perhaps not distantly related to it, of universal 
happiness. The lower tribal cultures do not 
apprehend conquest in that light — at least not 
usually — unless the Iroquois League suggests it 
among the American Indians. But the tribal 
nature of conquest appears in the cruelties, the 
enslavings, in the plunderings. These last were 
conspicuous with Napoleon. War as an art 
means science, and a successful war means fame, 
and this last impulse overpoweringly mingles its 
dolorous designs with the tribal propulsion toward 
war, /or its own sake, or for what it brings in gain. 

But there is something more mysterious, more 
recondite, implied in the tribe^ which we have 
hinted at, but not dwelt upon specifically. 

It is the "Bigotry of Blood" the ''Intense Racial 
or Caste Pride, and irreducible self-consciousness." 
There are the obvious commonplace phenomena of 
persistent imposition of the conquerors upon the 
conquered, with arrogance and superb scorn, but 
in Robespierre of the Revolution we seem, sud- 
denly to confront that racial intensity of feeling, 
concentrated in an individual with a theory. It 
really seems so. The analysis is dif^cult and ob- 
scure, perhaps, but we believe that sort of zealot 
is also tribal, that his temperament developes 
under tribal antecedents, conditions, and guaran- 
tees. We have treated of it less exiguously than 
we can here, under Religious Bigotry and the 
Inquisition. It is alluded to now as relative to 
that almost inexplicable character Robespierre, 
who might, under the broad glance of a superficial 



Tribe and Class 157 

estimate, be simply called a tribal despot, but 
whom Belloc has taught us to regard otherwise. 

"No man, almost, in history so incessantly 
haunted his audience with his repeated per- 
sonality — but he certainly imagined that he 
was but emphasizing the equality of men, the 
immortality of the soul, and all the other 
connected dogmas of the perfect State. He 
was infinitely suspicious and forever seeing 
himself abandoned — but it was because he 
was quite certain of his truths, and was con- 
vinced (generally with reason) that others less 
single-minded than himself were acting 
against what they knew to be political justice. 
It was not he but justice, that stood alone in 
the hall; his opponents were opposing not 
him, but self-evident and conspicuous truths." 
There is a phase of sublimity here, the apotheosis 
of the tribal obstinacy and tribal Infatuation, but 
we consider It injurious for the interests of men 
freely organized. It belongs to tribal communi- 
ties, and may work their resolution Into absolute 
anarchy, or into an impossible tyranny. Of 
course It comes when society has developed Ideas, 
and advanced along the road of mental or even 
spiritual convictions. What agonies of shame it 
wrought in the French Revolution, the black 
stigma of condemnation attached commonly to the 
name of Robespierre fully attests; what enormi- 
ties of conduct it prompted In the Inquisition, we 
have rehearsed in another chapter. Developed 
in individuals more genially composed, it — like an 



158 Europe's Handicap — 

inborn Nemesis of the tribe itself — may lead to 
unexpected progress and emancipation. But the 
object of this essay is purely denunciatory, and the 
tribal aspects of Europe, or of its history, that are 
meritorious, deserve no consideration here. 

We have alluded to Napoleon Bonaparte as a 
tribal chieftain. He was. He swept over Europe 
and plundered wherever he went; he antagonized 
almost the whole of Europe, and lived latterly in 
the exaltation of a dream of world-wide dominion. 
As a besom of destruction to superannuated and 
cruel monarchies, he served — let us say — the pur- 
poses of Freedom, but he was a tribal despot, and 
he flourished in the arena of battles, where his 
genius for accomplishing victorious slaughter, was 
indisputable and superb. The tribal traits were 
his, and though he despised — or pretended to — the 
ancient regime of Class, he, under the domination 
of the European tradition, believed it was neces- 
sary as a social institution. As a part of the tribal 
phenomena of Europe he prolongs its tribal life 
well into the Nineteenth century. His system of 
ethics is the tribal system's and is summed up in 
in three words. Conquest, Domination, Appropria- 
tion. 

Napoleon was a Corsican tribesman, and Rose 
asserts that the murder of the Due d'Enghien by 
Napoleon was regarded as "little more than an 
autocratic version of the vendetta tr avers ale" . In 
1796 he imposed a levy on Lombardy of twenty 
million francs, although he had only two days be- 
fore described the country as exhausted by five 



Tribe and Class 159 

years of war. With aesthetic discrimination he 
carried off the works of art from Italy in that cam- 
paign ; he battered down the gates of Pavia and his 
army, "massacred all the armed men for some 
hours, and glutted their lust and rapacity"; his 
generals amassed fortunes in Italy by prodigious 
thefts, and behind them came the cloud of 'Trench 
commissioners, dealers, and other civilian harpies, 
who battened on the spoil of Lombardy"; he 
looted Pope Pius VI, to the tune of 34,700,000 
francs, and one hundred pictures, busts, vases, or 
statues, together with five hundred manuscripts, 
— all of which might be submissively attributed, 
by his admirers, to the pecfection of his taste, and 
the depth of his scholarship — ; he plundered Leg- 
horn, though in this instance it was the tribal 
cupidity of the home government, (The Directors), 
that profited most; he continued the usual Euro- 
pean method of intrigue and extortion, when he 
wrote to the directory, "if your plan is to extract 
five or six million francs from Venice, I have 
expressly prepared for you this sort of rupture 
with her"; in 1798 his general Berthier entered 
Rome, and in true tribal style ransacked its 
treasures, and departed rich; about this time the 
french liberators of Switzerland rifled the 
treasuries of Berne, Zurich, Solothurn, Fribourg 
and Lucerne, extorting fifteen millions of francs 
by forced contributions; Rose describing Bona- 
parte's voyage to Egypt alludes with suave irony 
that "after dragging Malta out of its mediaeval 
calm and plunging it into the full swirl of modern 



160 Europe's Handicap — 

progress," he left it with his exchequer replenished 
by all the gold and silver, whether in bullion or in 
vessels, discoverable in the treasury of Malta, or 
in the Church of St. John. Alaric could scarcely 
have done better. It was all tribal. 

In the summer of 1799 there was confusion and 
uncertainty in France, and, at the critical moment, 
in the month of Brumaire, Napoleon dissolved the 
legislature, dispersed the Directory, and estab- 
lished the Consulate, with himself as First Consul. 
It was a propitious step for France. For then 
followed an exhibition of that marvellous sagacity, 
astute ingenuity, and diplomatic readiness, that 
brought peace to France, enabling her to tempor- 
arily withdraw^ her arms from the hostile en- 
counters with the nations of Europe, conciliated 
her internal factions, began the elevation of a 
meritorious order of social distinction, instituted 
reforms, civil and administrative, with the codifi- 
cation of her laws, the beautification of her 
capital, the rectification of religious relations with 
the Papacy, the founding of a system of education, 
designed to solidify the power of a stable govern- 
ment, and when the wonderful man who ruled her 
destinies, guided all, watched all, penetrated her 
smallest needs, and distributed around him in 
correspondence and conversations the crisp epi- 
grams of wit, and the profound reflections of 
wisdom. 

But yet Napoleon was tribal, and he lived 
among tribal states, with whom he was soon to 
again engage in tribal wars. It was at this time 



Tribe and Class 161 

in this placid interval of constructive statesman- 
ship — wherein however the observer does not dis- 
cern the emergence of truly democratic principles 
— that this tribal warrior analyzed with an in- 
trinsic emphasis of truth, the essence of tribal 
warfare, in these admirable sentences ; "the soldier 
knows no law but force, sees nothing but it, and 
measures everything by it. The civilian, on the 
other hand, only looks to the general welfare. 
The characteristics of the soldier is to wish to 
do everything despotically: that of the civilian is 
to submit everything to discussion, truth, and 
reason. The superiority thus unquestionably 
belongs to the civilian". Jt is perhaps impossible 
to gauge the depths of such a composite mind, 
whose scope of analysis permitted him to imper- 
sonally solve problems of government so dispas- 
sionately — while, were he to reveal the reticences 
of his inmost thought, he would have placed his 
own confidence in the control of the sword, and the 
dictums of an irreversible sovereign. The fas- 
cinating study cannot detain us; one glance at 
the succeeding period, when embattled Europe 
resisted this promising professor of civic freedom, 
and when with a splendor of achievement, un- 
rivalled by all the tribal captains of earlier cen- 
turies he deluged Europe in blood, and fed the 
tribal energies of its peoples with the panoramic 
picture of his conquering sweep from the canals 
of Holland to the snow-buried plains of Russia. 
He drained his country of its youth and strength, 
starting anew the fire of race animosity, and rein- 



162 Europe's Handicap — 

forcing, through the desperation of resistance, the 
ancient pride in tribal aims, while to that country 
of France, which had paid so dearly in moral incul- 
pation and material loss for its temporary expul- 
sion of tribal kings, he returned the degradation of 
an hereditary monarchy. 

The exorbitant energies of Napoleon, his keen 
intellectual vivacity, and the irrepressible imagina- 
tive force of his mind, soon launched him Into new 
designs of conquest. The tribal demon awoke 
portentously, and it awoke in a man gloriously 
endowed to gratify its appetites. Already France 
had acquired much, and also dominated Europe. 
Piedmont, the Duchy of Parma, the Rhine- 
provinces, Belgium were hers, and the Swiss and 
the Dutch were subjugated by her oppressive in- 
fluence, while a Franco-Russian alliance had been 
strongly cemented. Napoleon dreamed at first of 
a great western empire — Louisiana — a region of 
illimitable possibilities, which would absorb the 
young life of the nation, stir its ambitions and 
where new enterprise, fostered by new conditions, 
would yield incalculable wealth, where new enter- 
prises would yield new problems and new benefits. 

He turned also to Egypt, to India, to Australia, 
lured by that scenic charm of orientalism, to which 
a chord of picturesque excitability, in his nature, 
seemed always to respond. "Egypt was to be the 
keystone of that arch of empire which was to span 
the oceans and link the prairies of the far west to 
the teeming plains of India and the far Austral 
Isles." (Rose). Australia then was almost un- 



Tribe and Class 163 

known, thither the inquisitive fancy of the First 
Consul was turned. But his designs failed, per- 
haps, to bring to him that satiety of satisfaction 
which the control and regulation of a civilized 
group of communities would offer, whose activities 
enclosed the widest range of interests, whose prod- 
ucts remain the most stable ornaments of the 
human mind. He relinquished Louisiana, sur- 
rendering It to the United States, thwarting the 
probable plans of his arch enemy. Great Britain, 
to possess It for the annoyance and restriction of 
the new Republic — not Indeed that Napoleon was 
in love with republics, but It was a necessity. 

In Europe Intervention and strife quickly fol- 
lowed. There was uneasiness and dissatisfaction, 
the Incessant Irritations of restless envies, while 
the great chieftain, feeding the vanity of his race, 
easily stimulated by martial glory, nurtured the 
military spirit, the tribal urgency for war. Eng- 
land and France kept their respective embassies 
busy with claims and rectifications, refusals and 
threats, and the composite net-work of diplomatic 
pour-parlers shook with the frequency and serious- 
ness of their exchanges. Napoleon was nursing 
vast indefinable schemes, the original tribal blood 
coursed In his veins with Its not-to-be-denled 
vehemence and passion. England became un- 
manageable, perhaps was jealous and apprehen- 
sive, and Napoleon grew vindictive. Naples was 
cowed, his troops drained Its resources. Hanover 
was taken, and Napoleon contemplated war; 
"having quartered 60,000 French troops on Naples 



164 Europe's Handicap — 

and Hanover, Napoleon could face with equa- 
nimity the cost of the war. Gigantic as they were, 
they could be met from the purchase money of 
Louisiana, the taxation and voluntary gifts of the 
French dominions, the subsidies of the Italian and 
Ligurian republics, and a contribution which he 
now exacted from Spain." 

The French nation was startled by the ex- 
posure of an undoubted plot against the life of 
Napoleon, which, so fair a historian as Rose, 
believes was assisted by the English ministry. 
Then came the execution of the Due d'Enghien 
(1804), and as a climax to everything as the last 
reversal to the tribal and class formula, came the 
Empire and the ''establishment of heredity'', as 
Napoleon called it himself. Europe under the 
lead of England was now almost solidly enlisted 
against the incredible adventurer, though Prussia 
remained out of the coalition. The successive 
splendors of the campaigns that followed — inter- 
rupted by armistices, short peaceful interludes, 
and puzzling negotiations — are well known, each 
an explosive glory of martial skill, the amazing 
pyrotechnics of a genius whose fortune seemed 
sometimes to vie with, or even exceed its penetra- 
tion, and whose unscrupulous designs, its irritable 
audacities, its insolence and its vindictive passion, 
marked its subject as the typical tribal chieftain, 
though his temper accompanied talents that 
attained the limit of mental superiority. 

As in the earliest tribal warfare, the tribes suffer- 
ing from the inroads of some aspiring leader, who 



Tribe and Class 165 

carried his people along in devastating triumphs, 
gathered together in more or less temporary groups 
of resistance, so did the European nations arm 
together against this marauder. It was then as it 
has ever been — the tribal dilemma of Europe — the 
artificial loading of the scales of political prestige 
or territorial ownership in the equipoise called the 
Balance of Power, or the massing of the nations 
against the exorbitant designs of some tribal 
monstrosity, who wanted everything. Among a 
collection of justly organized and emancipated 
peoples, dwelling equally under the aegis of a 
common respect for freedom and personal indi- 
vidual dignity, no such d:rtifice would be necessi- 
tated. But in societies ruled by Class ideas, 
where monarchies, and dynasties, and the varied 
appeals of vanity, greed, fame even, summon to 
the surface of politics the conflicting interests of 
this family and of that, where the inheritance of 
tribal instincts, is perpetually driving the people 
themselves into schemes of aggrandizement, ruin- 
ous to a just civilization, WAR is the chief con- 
cern of national existence, for on WAR its main- 
tenance depends, and by WAR the factitious dis- 
tinctions of martial preeminence are conferred 
upon individuals, and upon nations. In all of this 
Napoleonic disturbance, which so thoroughly 
vexed, despoiled, and frightened Europe, there was 
no appeal to the franchises of the people, who of 
themselves — except so far as even the populace in 
Europe suffer from the inseparable tribal taint — 
would have allowed short shrift to the sway of their 



166 Europe's Handicap — 

bargaining and burglarious leaders. This tribal 
confusion served as a justification to Napoleon him- 
self, to aspire to be more than an Emperor of the 
French, for, "he wished to make his Empire a 
cosmopolitan realm, whose confines might rival 
those of the Holy Roman Empire of one thousand 
years before, and embrace a score of peoples in a 
grand, well-ordered European policy. 

"Already his dominions included a million of 
Germans on the Rhineland, Italians of Piedmont, 
Genoa, and Nice, besides Savoyards, Genevese, 
and Belgians. How potent would be its influence 
on the weltering chaos of German and Italian 
States, if these much divided peoples learned to 
look on him as the successor of the glories of 
Charlemagne!" (Rose). 

And in this dreadful prospect of war there was 
included its inevitable concomitant, the depletion 
of wealth. ''War must support war,'' and, like 
any original gothic or Celtic chief. Napoleon rifled 
the treasuries of the subjected countries. Forty 
million francs were contributed every year, as 
subsidies from Italy and Spain, and elsewhere 
forcible exactions were so contrived as to exactly 
meet the exigencies of his expensive campaigns, 
while wiping oflf the map the whole varied and 
interesting, and also ludicrous, little states and 
principalities with many of the free cities that had 
composed the confusion of German states, 
Napoleon made up his Rhenish Confederation of 
which he was Protector, and which was to furnish 
63,000 troops, when the Protector called for them. 



Tribe and Class 167 

The obliteration of these fantastic and aged 
political relics was scarcely to be regretted, 
though then, as Rose remarks, "German life began 
to lose much of the quaint diversity beloved of 
artists and poets." 

If the repeated spectacle of arbitrary and selfish 
acts, perpetrated by the conductors of European 
public affairs, the managers of the estates of the 
people, had not already stunned our sensibilities, 
the manner in which this tribal brigand handed 
out this province and that city, these franchises 
and those suzerainties, like pawns in a game, or 
bribes in a deal, and imposed orders of brutal 
harshness upon his satellites for special ends, 
would again awaken their susceptibility. It was 
an advanced or refined status over the freebooters 
of the Hun, the Tartar, the Frank, the Slav, the 
Dane, the Celt, the Gaul, but in essence it was the 
same ungovernable brutality. Promises were 
broken, duplicity spun webs of deception, and 
tyranny, disguised in glitter, in phrases, in barter, 
steadily strengthened its power. It was tribal 
indeed, but the art, that had developed with Class, 
elaborated Its technique. Napoleon assured the 
King of Prussia that Hanover should not be re- 
stored to England; at the very moment he was 
negotiating its transfer; a german wrote a 
patriotic pamphlet, "Germany in her Humilia- 
tion"; he is shot; to his brother Joseph, sup- 
pressing the Calabrian rebels, he says, ''shoot three 
men in every village''. This was thought, presum- 
ably in the operative habits of European states- 



168 Europe's Handicap — 

manship, correctly, that "true policy is nothing 
else than the calculation of combinations and 
chances," and of course it was not probably as 
outrageous indeed as had been the previous practice 
of centuries, where Class interests overshadowed 
all others, and made slaves or rebels of the people. 
The end was approaching; Ulm and Austerlitz 
subdued Austria, Jena and Auerstadt over- 
whelmed the Prussians, Friedland disconcerted 
the Russians, conducing to the peace of Tilsit, 
when Alexander of Russia and Napoleon embraced 
each other with, on one side delusive beguilements, 
on the other with a rapture not wholly disinter- 
ested, — for, says Rose, "it is now known that the 
Czar had set his heart on a great part of Prussian 
Poland". Again the typical tribe and class spirit. 
As usual the kings cut and quartered, and Napo- 
leon probably lied. There was a published treaty 
and there were secret articles, and the partition 
and distribution of the public viands — with bons 
bouches, as entrees, of concessions and pensions — 
and a very fine garnishment of agreement as to 
what should be done with England and Turkey, 
with the Courts of Copenhagen, Stockholm, and 
Lisbon, if these unconsulted entities of state 
proved refractory, while Sweden and Finland were 
held over the watering mouth of the Czar, as 
future delicious morsels. The Continental Sys- 
tem was complete. It was all tribal autocracy, 
but tremendously intellectualized, or even ro- 
manticized by nineteenth century skill, perversion, 
and vainglorious dreams. 



Tribe and Class 169 

And after all what happened? The French 
army was quartered for sixteen months on miser- 
able Prussia, the French people suffered immense 
privations by the exclusion of the English ships 
from their harbors, while Napoleon, enthralled 
by the vision of Oriental conquest, plunged more 
deeply into a repressive policy, the tribal or class 
ideal of "outward Compulsion". The struggle of 
Napoleon and England stiffened into a headstrong 
unyielding duel, with Napoleon epigrammatically 
claiming that the Land should subdue the Sea, and 
England coercing Denmark, seizing her fleet, in its 
effort to grasp the maritime supremacy, which 
tradition and experience- assigned to her. Then 
Portugal was to be divided, and the superb chief- 
tain nonchalantly remarked, "as for Portugal I 
make no difficulty about granting to the King of 
Spain a suzerainty over Portugal, and even taking 
part of it away for the queen of Etruria and the 
Prince of Peace," this latter sarcasm indicating a 
paramour of the queen of Spain (Godoy), in all of 
which stream of usurpations one thought governed 
the piratical measures considered, viz. the exclu- 
sion of England from the ports of the Continent, 
and the control of the continental fleets. Every- 
where was arbitrariness, willful trespassing, bare- 
faced chicanery, undisguised brigandage, as when 
Napoleon wrote — "and if the Pope commits an 
imprudence, it will be a fine opportunity for de- 
priving him of the Roman States." Then the 
Spanish crown was seized, Spain's king pensioned, 
and the Indies compressed within the omniscient 
range of this man's political voracity. 



170 Europe's Handicap — 

More and more outrages were perpetrated, and 
at once, on every hand, appeared the unmistakable 
portents of revolt in the conquered countries, 
while English assistance — again cursed by the 
preference of Class — under the command of the 
Earl of Chatham — was decimated by disease. 
That incompetent commander "finally withdrew 
his army into the Isle of Walcheren, into whose 
fever-laden swamps Napoleon had refused to send 
a single French soldier. A tottering remnant was 
all that survived by the close of the year: and the 
climax of our national disgrace was reached when 
a court-martial acquitted the commanders. 
Napoleon would have had them shot" (Rose). 

The Tyrolean peasantry set an example of 
determined courage to their moribund monarch, 
emperor Francis, but were beaten down by French, 
Bavarian, and Italian soldiers, the conglomerate 
tribal offerings of as many different states. Listen 
to John Holland Rose's expressive summation of 
the Napoleonic zenith, a picture of tribal grandeur, 
where the chieftain however conjoined with his 
lighting prowess the modern skill of a consummate 
constructive administration. *'He had humbled 
Pope and Emperor alike: Germany crouched at 
his feet: France, Italy, and the Confederation of 
the Rhine gratefully acknowledged the benefits of 
his vigorous sway: the Czar was still following the 
lead given at Erfurt: Sweden had succumbed to 
the pressure of the two emperors: and Turkey 
survived only because it did not yet suit Napoleon 
to shear her asunder: he must first complete the 



Tribe and Class 171 

commercial ruin of England, and drive Wellington 
into the sea." Spain had been cut into portions, 
whose taxation would lighten the fiscal needs of 
the tireless and amazing marauder, while their 
gradual annexation to France would enlarge the 
imperial domain; a few months later Holland was 
annexed to France, and amongst all of these mani- 
fold trangressions of justice, one absurd incident — 
like a transcendent touch of comedy — illustrates 
anew the preposterous illusions of Class, even when 
its pretensions are temporary, artificial, and sub- 
stitutional; the emperor's brother, made by him 
king of Holland, conceived literally that ''he 
reigned there by divine right!'' 

The grandly organized but perishable system 
went to pieces, its meretricious unity dissolved 
before the attacks of tribal patriotism, the aims of 
potentates dissatisfied with its restrictions, the 
disappointment of Russian ambitions, the bitter- 
ness of internal strife, the hardships of national 
penury, and the disintegrating assaults of England. 
Tribal assertions shook apart the artificial and 
obnoxious confederacies, the renewed aspirations 
of Class arose unflinchingly to uproot the destroyer 
who had degraded its estates. Military disaster 
flung from off the despot the dazzling apparel of 
predestined autocracy. In the Russian campaign 
from 600,000 only 20,000 "famished, frost-bitten, 
unarmed spectres staggered across the bridge of 
Kovno in the middle of December" (Rose). New 
conscriptions were in order, new levies of taxes, 
and the indeterminate future badly deranged his 



172 Europe's Handicap — 

confidences in his allies, while the bursting spirit 
of nationalism threatened at every point the 
bulging and cracking dams of coalition, only held 
in place by bayonets, cannons, and diplomacy. 
That tribal intensity of racial feeling, that creates 
zealots and patriots of the noblest types, blazed 
forth and the days of the great emperor were 
numbered, while on all sides, for a moment at 
least, the rivalries of place, position and possession 
became subordinated to the momentous upheaval, 
that would cast him down. Indeed at this terrific 
crisis the purest nobility of feeling was shown 
among the masses in Germany; there the heroism 
of Korner the memory of Stein the exortation of 
Steffens and the devotion of Arndt contrasted with 
the tribal designs of Metternich, the Class plot- 
tings of Alexander, and the commercial avarice of 
England. As usual there was playing of cards 
enough, and the ministries wavered, cajoled, 
scraped, and bowed, insinuated and frowned, 
bargained and bartered before the final arbitra- 
ment was adjudged, upon the field of battle. 

Then quickly followed the victories of the eng- 
lish in Spain, the renewed revolts of the popula- 
tions against the French invaders, fresh drawings 
together of the Russian, Prussian, and Austrian 
interests, the battle of Lutzen, then Dresden and 
Leipzig, Napoleon's retreat, the fall of Paris, and 
Napoleon's abdication. That intense dramatic 
movement — almost fictitious in its scenic pictures- 
queness — which administers to the story of Napo- 
leon a deathless interest, culminated in his return, 



Tribe and Class 173 

the one hundred days, the battles of Ligny, 
Quatre Bras, and Waterloo, Napoleon's surrender 
to the English, and those melancholy years of the 
vanquished commander at St. Helena. 

The shiftiness of European national policy, its 
evanescent sense of probity, the recurrent, if not 
always present, personal ends, aims, and conten- 
tions of individuals, or houses, or dynasties, blown 
with pride, or simply seditious with greed, are 
markedly shown in the Napoleonic drama, and 
alongside of it too that unquenchable spring of 
human idealism — the best guarantee of Democ- 
racies — as in the Tugimdhiind of Prussia, which 
was the outpouring of the^patriotism of the people. 
It was Metternich, a master Mephistopheles in 
trickery and deceit, albeit at times serving the 
best and truest needs of his country, who wrote in 
1809, **we must confine our system to tacking and 
turning and flattering. Thus alone may we 
possibly preserve our existence, till the day of 
general deliverance". It was Metternich and the 
Emperor Francis of Austria, who supported or 
were subservient to Napoleon in 1813, because 
they dreaded Jacobinism and pan-Germanism, 
and because they also feared Russian aggrandize- 
ment, feared her sword guarding the entrance of 
the Danube, and her squadrons of Cossacks over- 
running Poland. Austria had lost the Tyrol and 
Illyria, and Vienna was only thinking of an equiva- 
lent exchange for these lost provinces. The tribal 
and the class instinct of acquisitiveness, of plunder, 
of enrichment, at some one else's expense is the 



174 Europe's Handicap — 

habitual attitude of the European nations, and 
when this attitude is assumed, the whole political 
activity of the continent becomes a game of grab. 
Russia contemplated nefarious inroads into Po- 
land, and even further, while Europe struggled 
with the enveloping folds of the Napoleonic 
python. Prussia was worried over the eastern 
boundary — a boundary to-day Germany is seeking 
to rectify — for, the great Duchy of Warsaw once 
appropriated by Russia, her existence was again 
straightened between the Muscovite on the east 
and the Celt on the west. The Goth had no use 
for either. Again Austria held off from too 
enthusiastic mingling in the fray, because while 
posing as mediator she could claim her share in the 
territorial redistribution which must accompany 
the peace, a tribal reticence truly, after the later 
fashion of Class refinements. And the relentless 
aggressor, who had emptied Hamburg of 20,000, the 
young and strong as dangerous, the old and weak 
as useless (Rose), had kept on tightening his hold 
at all points, with his magnificent eyes in a hungry 
fever of lust, fastened upon regions yet literally 
beyond any man's purview. 

The allies were often in a ferment of distrust of 
each other after Dresden and Leipzig, and their 
greatest alarm arose rapidly at the increasingly 
omnivorous appetite of Czar Alexander; dissen- 
sions were rife, a condition typically tribal. 

At all times before his final submergence. 
Napoleon was difficult, (as the Yankees say), and 
the pulling and hauling in the diplomatic tug of 



Tribe and Class 175 

Minds, and Wills, and Interests, produces a feeling 
of mortified exhaustion. Only Napoleon's ob- 
stinate blindness, his intemperate passion, unified 
the crumbling opposition. The Bourbons came 
swiftly forward at the end for the resumption of 
power and place; on all sides the evidence of an 
eager rapacity, whose hunger had been too long 
denied, were seen, and when the end did come, at 
the first abdication, there was the expected dis- 
tribution of lands and maintenance. The Em- 
peror was allotted the Island of Elba; to his wife 
and son was given the duchies of Parma, Placentia 
and Guastalla, and 2,000,000 of francs as an annual 
subsidy. The BonapartQS were provided for also. 
The inexcusable crimes which had been committed 
were quite forgotten, for, in Europe through its 
ingrained familiarity with war, with its tacit 
recognition of the inviolability of title, and title's 
predestined exemption from work, the perpetra- 
tors of slaughter are reckoned glorious, and the 
habits of indolence are esteemed as distinguished. 
The democratic solution of climaxes of this sort 
is much simpler, though less imposing. The cul- 
prits must suffer the consequences of their misde- 
meanors, and in their overthrow and reabsorption 
in the mass of men and women who surround them, 
become later simply what they make themselves 
to be by work and influence. And yet there is an 
appropriate magnanimity after all in Europe's 
way. The men or women who have developed, 
matured, and lived in the atmosphere of a social 
separateness from the rest of men, have acquired 



176 Europe's Handicap — 

an unrelaxed hold pride of class, which has 
moulded their whole psychological nature, into a 
fixed retinue of feelings, cannot, without a cruelty, 
indistinguishable from torture, be torn from their 
environment, and forced to live in ordinary ways. 
Witness the formation of an Imperial Court on the 
Island of Elba for "the delectation of Napoleon's 
mother and his sister Pauline". This has its 
pathos, not far removed from a ludicrous pettiness 
and juvenility of feeling, peculiar perhaps to a 
diseased sensorium. In the same way, possibly, 
by the death of king Edward of England, his 
widow, deprived of the glamour and ostentation 
of a court, recreated a household of pretentious 
splendor, and fought ofT the ennui of her desola- 
tion by an affectation of pomp. And it was well 
illustrated in the case of James II, exiled to 
France from England, who maintained, with the 
money of the French, a court at St. Germains, 
with consistent decorum. It seems allied — this 
tyrannical craving of Class — to the insufferable 
needs of people, who use drugs, and have perverted 
nature by fictitious pleasures. 

When Napoleon was well out of the way, the 
bargainings, and dickers, and quarterings, among 
the other tribes and tribesmen were prolonged 
almost vociferously, and with ruthless thrift, and 
quite regardlessly too of what the people, thus 
negligently treated, cared for, themselves. It is 
impossible to rehearse it. The discord was pro- 
nounced, the gluttony boundless. Let us only 
note that Italy which had been unified under 



Tribe and Class 177 

Napoleon, was again sliced and rent into 
fragments, for the Class beneficiaries. Louis VXIII 
who confiscated all the properties of the Bona- 
partes, never paid a centime of the sums, the 
stipulations of the Allies required him to pay, for 
Napoleon'ssupport; a Classexampleof royal honor. 

The Napoleonic drama illustrates, in a some- 
what contrasted way to the sketches of European 
conditions we have already introduced here, the 
contentions of this essay. Such a masterful and 
ruinous control by a mind of almost superhuman 
virility and brilliancy could only have secured its 
fulcrum of accomplishment, in tribal and class 
societies, — environments — ^ where the institutes 
of heredity in government, and an absence of 
wisdom and experience in self-government among 
the masses, obtained. The tribal pugnacity, the 
Class craving for power, centralized in an indi- 
vidual of superior endowments, contributed the 
necessary dynamic elements to bring about the 
vast convulsion of conditions, helped too in his 
case by a previous outburst of popular resentment. 
It all took place in a world of tribal antecedents, 
and class habits. 

And again, if Napoleon was a tribal chieftain, 
transfigured and illuminated by all that the pro- 
gress of fifteen hundred years could contribute to 
his personnel, to his implements, he was also a 
scorching, consuming, meteoric flame, that burned 
away much of the sophistry of Class, and relegated 
to the scrap-heap of abandoned mysteries, or 
prejudices, or make-shifts, the emptiness of social 



178 Europe's Handicap — 

distinctions, that were not founded upon talent 
and upon service. To all this besides, of course in 
Napoleon, the dramatic sense and the poetic eye 
discern a master of effects, a splendid generallzer 
of mass movements among men, and the theatrical 
artist as well, on a majestic scale too, who would 
wave the wand of scenic transformations, and 
bind the storied past, with its pageantries and 
mysticism, with some modern macrocosm of 
nationalities into a world-fact of consolidated 
realms, and reduplicated splendors. It all ended 
at St. Helena. It was after all evanescent, be- 
cause it was tribal and personal. 

If we now come nearer to that terrific phe- 
nomenon of WAR which to-day is desolating 
Europe, postulating as we did from the beginning 
that the tribal and class features of European 
nationality lie at the root of her miserable con- 
flicts, let us enter the year 1854. 

It would be possible to dwell with some unction, 
along the lines of our convictions, upon the Divi- 
sion of Poland in 1777, which was a tribal act of 
the meanest selfishness, actuated though by the 
almost hopeless incompetence of Poland's Class 
rulers, but, that we may more securely lay the 
foundations of our impeachment of the present 
war, as the result of tribal and class conditions, 
we will take the next example of both, nearer our 
own time, viz. 1854, when the Crimean war 
started. 

The tribe and the chieftain and the moot, the 
former a rough horde of half disciplined but always 



Tribe and Class 179 

formidable men, the second a romantic figure in 
skin-harness with shield and battle axe, the last a 
vociferous assemblage of dishevelled figures bran- 
dishing spears or smiting in a clangor of assent 
their metallic shields, were not discernable in the 
armies and parliament and ministry of England, 
in the Emperor and Corps L e gi slatif aiud regiments 
of France, or in the booted, spurred, and cloak 
draped form of Nicholas, czar of All the Russias, 
with his ministers, his generals, and squadrons of 
Cossacks, in the year 1854. But still tribes and 
tribesmen they were all together, by reasons of the 
predicament of position and the ineffaceable inci- 
dence of custom. For their position was the 
proximity of rival states, their customs the wary 
watchfulness of individual jealousy and ambition, 
and such a collocation of place and temperament 
meant war and only war — and WAR is literally 
the tribal state. 

The tribal idea is almost inseparable from the 
purpose and the practice of war, and the growth of 
natures under a stimulus so truculent, indubita- 
bly matures into strains of feeling that are belli- 
cose, aggressive, and irritable. In Europe super- 
added to the cultivation of the war-spirit, itself an 
implanted instinct in the aboriginal breast of the 
European settlers, was the selfish aims of Class 
advancement, the potentiality of the pride and 
ambitions of rulers. As the nomadic masses that 
constituted the populations of the yet inchoate 
and formative Europe, agglutinated intospheres of 
political autonomy, and became nations, they put 



180 Europe's Handicap — 

on aspects of less lawless impulse than character- 
ized their rude ancestors, but the motives of action 
were almost identical. Something called Inter- 
national Law had been accumulated into a digest 
more or less precise, and dignitaries called Ministers 
handled, under the suave decorum, or should it be 
designated as disguise, of words, the insinuations 
of states which might later become threats, and the 
words themselves, by the most natural prefix of 
one letter, become swords. The somewhat recog- 
nized intertribal boundaries of the tribes in the 
middle of the nineteenth century had hardened 
into an intelligible and discrete bit of phraseology, 
as the Balance of Power, which portrayed a really 
variable condition, but one so influenced by the 
practical relations of existence, under tribal 
reciprocity, as to insure to each nation a com- 
mendable stability. To be sure much later than 
1854, Germany appropriated Sleswick and Hol- 
stein from Denmark, Alsace and Lorraine from 
France, and, through the compulsory cementation 
of war, Prussia consolidated the communities of 
the aforetime Rhenish confederation. That 
startled Europe, but it did not completely upset 
her, and the Ministers and International Law 
maintained their official gravity unimpaired, not 
without — we are quite sure — indulging in some 
prophetic glances forwards, when their behaviour 
might become less sedate, and their voices less 
reticent. Later events did perhaps justify their 
confidence in their powers of verbal skill, when the 
issue arose, for at the treaty of Berlin, in 1878, 



Tribe and Class 181 

many unexpected things happened, secured 
through ministerial bargains, rather than by 
the proverbial arbitrament of arms. 

But there was still a portion of Europe which 
remained a moles indigesta, and that was Turkey 
and the south eastern principalities, some of them 
at the time part of Turkey itself, and their 
eventual disposition lay somewhat in the laps of 
the gods, with a predisposition on the part of 
Russia and Austria, to assist the divinities at any 
critical moment of indecision. And there were 
two other circumstances ominous to the peace of 
Europe in 1854 both of which were related to what 
we have named here Glass Domination. One 
was a monstrous royal Thief, in western Europe — 
in France — Louis Napoleon Bonaparte of whom 
Kinglake has written, "he must have accustomed 
himself to hear sometimes what conscience had to 
say, for it is certain that, with a pen in his hand 
and with sufficient time for preparation, he could 
imitate very neatly the scrupulous language of a 
man of honor", and the other was Nicholas czar 
of Russia, who the same author tells us ''had 
busied himself all his days in organizing armies 
and reviewing drilled men, and grinding down his 
people into the mere fractional components of an 
army, until the very faces of soldiers in the same 
battalion were brought to be similar and uniform." 
And it so happened that tribal propensities in the 
latter, and Class dreams in the former, did precipi- 
tate an unnecessary and — as always — cruel war, 
for war even when reduced to its lowest dimen- 



182 Europe's Handicap — 

sions, as in fisticuffs or feminine aspersions, means 
painful disfigurement. England was dragged into 
that war, whether as the dupe of France, (viz 
Louis Napoleon Bonaparte), as Kinglake avers, or 
from the importunity of her own interests, or from 
both, may remain undetermined. The view here 
adopted follows the analysis of Alexander William 
Kinglake, modified by the less acrimonious judg- 
ments of Justin McCarthy. 

Louis Napoleon Bonaparte had reversed the will 
of republican France. As its president he ne- 
fariously plotted its destruction. He made him- 
self Emperor, with the assistance of a few des- 
perately ruthless men, and having established 
himself by the force of bayonets, became a partici- 
pant, or an accomplice, in a massacre of some 
twenty-four thousand citizens of Paris, which 
completely terrorized the country, followed as it 
was, everywhere, by "slaughter, banishment, 
imprisonment, sequestration". The tribal feroc- 
ity exemplified its unimpaired vitality, and was 
exercised upon a people in the provinces whose 
servility or servitude to Class, easily induced a 
successful intimidation. But for the purposes of 
unimpeachable success more had to be done. 

''The army in the provinces closely imitated 
the ferocity of the army of Paris, but it was to be 
apprehended that soldiery, however fierce, might 
deal only with the surface of discontent, and not 
strike deep enough into the heart of the country. 
They might kill people in streets, and roads, and 
fields; they might even send their musket-balls 



Tribe and Class 183 

through windows, into the houses, and shoot whole 
batches of prisoners; but they could not so well 
search out the indignant friends of law and order 
in their inner homes. Therefore Morny sent into 
the provinces men of dire repute, and armed them 
with terrible powers. These persons were called 
Commissaries. In every spot so visited the people 
shuddered, for they knew by their experience of 
1848, that a man thus set over them by the terrible 
Home Office might be a ruffian, well known to the 
police for his crimes, as well as for his services, and 
that from a potentate of that quality it might cost 
them dear to buy their safety". In the thorough- 
ness of this criminal exploitation twenty six 
thousand men were transported — an act reflecting 
modern political expedients of Europe, but also 
authentically a reversion to tribal barbarism and 
Class tyranny. 

Once enthroned, Louis Napoleon recurring — for 
his mind was in a sort of subterranean perpetual 
motion — to an observation of his great namesake, 
*'the French have lively imaginations: they love 
fame and excitement and are nervous". Napoleon, 
the lesser, became portentously thoughtful. **For 
what he and his associates wanted, and what in 
truth they really needed, was to thrust France into 
a conflict, which might be either diplomatic or 
warlike, but which was at all events to be of a 
conspicuous sort, tending to ward off the peril of 
home politics, and give to the fabric of the 2d of 
December something like station and celebrity 
in Europe." 



184 Europe's Handicap — 

The occasion for a realization of their hopes was 
not far off. Russia had become entangled in a 
quarrel with Turkey over the privileges of the 
Greek church in the Holy Land, and under the 
disguise of a religious propagandum doubtless 
harbored the illicit desire for territorial extension. 
That was also distinctly tribal in its morality, and, 
from the viewpoint of the Czar's personal prestige, 
distinctly imposing too. Of course there was 
friction, and then there was a collision, and the 
"massacre of Sinope", ensued, whereby in a sea- 
fight in the Black Sea, between the Russian and 
the Turkish fleets, four thousand Turks were 
killed, and less than four hundred wounded men 
survived. This event, and the wholesale resent- 
ment it caused, swept aside the dilatory measures 
of the diplomats, and though, for many months, 
the exchange of notes between the capitals of 
Europe survived, as a concession to the usages of 
the later age, the recrudescence of racial antipa- 
thies, combined with personal designs, brought 
about the Crimean war. France and England 
combined in defence of Turkey, and were pitted 
against Russia, with Austria and Prussia watchful, 
expectant, and not unobservant of possible ad- 
vantages which might accrue, in some final reas- 
sortment of properties; for Austria at least, at the 
outset, had imposed a halt upon the depredations 
of the Czar, in the Principalities. 

Under Lord Palmerston, as against the pacific 
remonstrances of Bright, Cobden, and Gladstone, 
the english, eagerly assented to the preparations 



Tribe and Class 185 

for war. Palmerston's absolute mastery of his 
convictions, the unmistakable stubbornness — 
perhaps narrowness — of his confidence, captivated 
english sympathies, not averse at any time to 
ascertainable and measurable gains. As 
McCarthy describes him, he was "gay, resolute, 
clear as to his own purpose, convinced to the 
heart's core of everything which just then it was 
for the advantage of his cause to believe". Lord 
Raglan, a contemporary of Wellington, gracefully 
impressive, statuesque, elevated, in taste and 
manner, commanded the English, and St. Arnaud, 
the french, whose picture with skillful irony King- 
lake has drawn, "he was bold, gay, reckless, and 
vain; but beneath the mere glitter of the surface 
there was a great capacity for administrative 
business, and a more than common willingness to 
take away human life." 

The events of the war, brilliantly narrated by 
Kinglake, need not detain us, from our ultimate 
aim, now approaching, aside from a passing allu- 
sion to the sufferings from disease, the appalling 
loss of life. The war was of Class origin, in the 
sense imposed here upon that expression, inasmuch 
as it had its initiation in the selfish plans of a 
seditious plotter, of monarchical tendencies, the 
man whose malign designs this country realized, 
whenin its Civil War, he sent Maximilian of Austria 
to seize Mexico, upon a pretext. And it also came 
about from the ambitions of a despotic mind, con- 
trolling peremptorily every activity of a vast 
tribal organization. It involved the support of a 



186 Europe's Handicap — 

detestable nation, whose later atrocities astounded 
Europe; it contained no principle of idealism in 
its contention, and raised aloft at its conclusion, 
no standard of emancipation, unless we so con- 
sider the participation of Sardinia in it, as prog- 
nostic of Italian liberty. 

At its close there was the usual spectacle of a 
group of powers apprehensively scrutinizing the 
articles of a treaty whereby their mutual misgiv- 
ings or distrusts may be pacified, or momentarily 
forgotten. There were indeed some rules of mari- 
time warfare laid down, which the present conduct 
of England, with regard to the commerce of the 
United States, seems now emphatically to re- 
pudiate. The sore spot in the East, was not 
healed, though a medicament, of some complica- 
tion, was applied, as an antiseptic poultice, to that 
recurrent tumor. The Crimean War was a plot, 
and tribal and Class conditions fructified the seed 
of its inception. Twenty-two years later Russia 
and Turkey were flying at each other's throats. 

It had been possible to have averted the whole 
calamity, and it is tacitly assumed here — though 
we admit the assumption has its qualifications — 
that war is a calamity, or, as Mr. Norman Angell 
has so earnestly striven to prove, is futile. The 
first discomfiture of the Russians in their battles 
with the Turks under Omar Pasha, and two 
brilliant englishmen, Butler and Nasmyth, in the 
Danubian provinces proved to Russia the hopeless- 
ness of her attempts at the invasion of Turkey, and 
inasmuch as England, as Kinglake points out, 



Tribe and Class 187 

desires no territorial increase in Europe, her 
power, if wisely exercised, and with a disposition 
more allied to our democratic peaceful institutions, 
might have at that moment stopped the war. But 
the tribal momentum in England herself gained 
even then headway, was indeed interpreted as a 
healthy reaction against the protests of the 
extreme Peace Party. ''Therefore England, it 
must be acknowledged, did much to bring on the 
war, first by the want of moderation and prudence 
with which she seemed to declare her attachment 
to the cause of peace, and afterwards by the ex- 
ceeding eagerness with which she coveted the 
strife." (Kinglake). War. is a tribal industry, 
and among the utilities of Europe has been 
recognized as a desirable adjunct to national 
greatness. 

The intentions of this chapter have been suffi- 
ciently declared, and their illustration definitely 
given. A few phases of European history, not 
perhaps more convincing than many others, 
have been selected, and briefly reviewed, 
as proof of our thematic title, viz. Tribal 
Wars and Class Domination. Class domination 
could have been much more explicitly detailed, 
and the justice of our arraignment of its 
pernicious influence in European disorders in- 
exorably sustained. But the matter is too well 
understood to require excessive or even deliberate 
recital. The shameless profligacy of Class, its in- 
iquitous exactions in the reign of Louis XV of 
France, was perhaps the climax of the inevitable 



188 Europe's Handicap — 

result of a criminal fallacy in the social contract, 
which involved a mistake in scientific genetics, and 
an injustice in ethics as well, viz., that there are 
inheritable distinctions in blood, aside from con- 
duct. It was the Holy Alliance that, after the 
Napoleonic wars, formed, as Julian S. Corbett — 
the eulogist of the English navy — says ''that 
brotherhood of reactionary monarchies intended to 
stifle independent national life, and free institu- 
tions." It was Class domination, more exclu- 
sively than any other influence, that brought about 
the American revolution, and which rather hope- 
fully regarded our Civil War as the predestined 
termination to what it conceived was an unneces- 
sary political solecism. It was Class domination 
that applied a system of exhaustive or intensive 
depletion of Cuba, that resulted in her final freedom 
— thanks to the sympathy and fruitful help of the 
United States. It was Class domination that 
wrecked the first tolerant hopes of Russian democ- 
racy, and lastly it was Class domination that 
thwarted the aims of liberal England, in very 
recent years. It is decidedly a Class domination 
in Germany and in Austria, that stifles the utter- 
ances of progressive sentiment, and has almost 
resurrected the buried remains of Divine Right. 

And it is the pervasive strength of the Class idea 
that maintains everywhere the institution of 
royalty, with its appurtenances, court, court in- 
fluences, the alluring superstitions of family ca- 
reers and eminence, and the scintillating pageantry 
of militant preparation. It is the Class idea that 



Tribe and Class 189 

formulates the present and the future on the 
records of the past, and, persistently clinging to a 
picturesque continuity, refuses to interrupt or 
terminate that continuity with a plebian democ- 
racy. The terminology of class maintains the 
terminology of war, of war memories, of war-like 
events, and the very glitter of its heraldry arose 
in war and perpetuates war's rewards. Class is a 
menace to the dissemination of peace and peace 
ideals, and it derides the propriety of compromise. 
Class generates the pestiferous race of conquerors, 
and, under the protection of its apologies, the im- 
piety of conquest flourishes. Of course there is 
nobility in Class ideals, and the highest aspirations 
of Kingship should be Fatherhood. But the facts 
oppose our confidence in the invariability of their 
identity. Brawling democracies, with every bit- 
terness of hate, flimsiness of pretext, and even 
tyranny of prejudice, are possible enough, but it 
seems certain too that a progressive culture surely 
mellows their crudities into self-restraint and 
tolerance. 

But there is something more subtly dangerous 
and hurtful than the overt acts of its agents in 
suppressing violently the generous impulses of 
men. It is a contagion of feeling that afiflicts the 
nations, where Class Is a regulated and entrenched 
Institution. That feeling is really two contrasted 
phases of feeling. One phase Is a venomous or 
sullen hatred, or just simply a philosophic hostility 
to Class. The other phase is the contentment and 
pride in Class, not unmixed with a placid con- 



190 Europe's Handicap — 

sciousness that Class is a good thing. This latter 
feeling degenerates into servility, an exaggerated 
deference, and an unconscious acceptance of the 
standards and precepts of Class. It perpetuates 
the tribal sense — always apparently strong in the 
European races and necessarily stronger when 
those races are nationalized into states — of 
belligerency, and establishes a currency of national 
ambitions, which generally means extension, 
territorial growth, and eliminates the democratic 
ideals of mutual helpfulness. 

The otherfeeling of hostility, or positive froward 
hatred, unsettles nations with its sedition, and 
arousing the self-preservative instincts of Class — 
always irritable and vainglorious — brings about 
the standardization of FORCE in armies and 
bureaucracies. About this there can be little 
doubt. The Mob in its worst aspects is a product 
of Class and Tribe. Force is its correction. 
Before this present war is discussed a task, far 
more difficult than the foregoing attempted 
demonstration, engages us in the next chapter. 
It must be condensed into a series of declarative 
sentences not necessarily proven, but believed by 
the author to be demonstrable. Its very state- 
ment must awaken that sort of surprise which 
intimates resentment and ridicule, if not the 
fiercer punishment of a refusal to consider it at all. 
It is this. 

It was the original fierceness of tribal feeling, 
complicated or exasperated and curiously solidi- 
fied by a sense of Duty, that developed religious 



Tribe and Class 191 

Bigotry and the Inquisition. In an environment 
of Equality between men on the basis of talent 
and service, and in a perfectly Free State, neither 
would have issued into the arena of politics or 
civics, as an integral element of government. The 
reason is apparent upon the slightest considera- 
tion. In a state of true freedom a man's 
THOUGHTS are his own, indefeasibly his own, and 
within the circuit of his brain — be it small or 
large — they are permitted to assume any shape, 
short of madness, and their owner remains uncon- 
fined, unassailed. Once past his lips, if they spell 
ruin or disturbance to a legitimate security of his 
fellowmen, they become treason. 

With us the largess of free thought and free 
speech is almost unlimited. In the tribal states 
and under Class domination neither could exist. 



CHAPTER VI 

Religious Bigotry and the Inquisition 
Products of Tribe and Class 

The tribal mind is credulous, superstitious, and 
inflexible, the tribal spirit heartless, ferociously so, 
(many pages in this essay have demonstrated 
that), and the tribal heart often brave beyond 
computation, and inordinate in its lusts. Class 
privileges deteriorated earlier conditions of so- 
briety, or restraint, and a tide of indulgences 
invaded the barbaric simplicities of tribal life, as 
civilization increased its allurements, and estab- 
lished its sway over the rude hordes that had been 
absorbed, or later were inserted through the 
Roman Empire. Almost contemporaneously with 
the growth of Class domination, the christian 
religion spread its influence over these ingenuous 
aboriginals. (Perhaps "ingenuous" may be quali- 
fied, as the instances of deceit and perfidy are not 
uncommon.). 

This wonderful faith of Christianity which had 
subdued the repellent roughness of the savage, and 
had become beautifully embodied indeed in some 
of the finer, sweeter temperaments of the Frank, or 
Goth, or Celt, was itself reacted upon by a psychol- 
ogy quite at variance with eastern or oriental or 
Jewish feeling. 



Tribe and Class 193 

The tribal spirit was, as we have said, heartless, 
cruel, and correspondingly intense or intolerant. 
A conviction became a menace, and a religious 
conviction imbedded in superstition, as it was, or 
was likely to be at the time, and consecrated too as 
a tie between the man who held it, and a Supreme 
Being who had warranted it, became as Lea says 
"a determining factor of conduct." The racial 
pride which guarded the tribe against dissolution 
or absorption animated, with the same preserva- 
tive resentment against contamination, a believer's 
creed. The Church represented this creed, and 
the Church assumed the tribal intolerance. It 
could not help doing so. " It soon became also a 
hierarchical organization, and its Class domination 
touched the sublimest heights of pretension. This 
too arose from the very terms of the Revelation 
it embodied. 

""Princes derive their power from the Church, 
and are servants of the priesthood"; "The least 
of the priestly order is worthier than any king; 
prince and people are subjected to the clergy, 
which shines superior as the sun to the moon"; 
and Pope Innocent III declared himself "placed 
midway between God and man, this side of God 
but beyond man, less than God but greater than 
man". 

The assumption was perilous, but as Mr. Lea 
points out, "it was none the less a service to hu- 
manity, that, in these rude ages, there existed a 
moral force superior to high descent, and martial 
prowess, which could remind king and noble that 



194 Europe's Handicap — 

they must obey the law of God even when uttered 
by a peasant's son". 

The progress of a purely mundane elevation was 
soon begun, and the human or profane elements of 
pride, arrogance, the tribal quest for possessions, 
asserted themselves invincibly. "This was especi- 
ally the case in Germany, where the prelates were 
princes as well as priests, and where a great reli- 
gious house like the Abbey of St. Gall was the 
temporal ruler of the Cantons of St. Gall and 
Appenzel until the latter threw ofT the yoke after a 
long and devastating war". The tribal warring 
propensities became strongly manifested in the 
very men whose separative functions were service 
at the altar. "Geroch of Reichersperg inveighs 
bitterly against the warlike prelates who provoke 
unjust wars, attacking the peaceful and delighting 
in the slaughter which they cause and witness, 
giving no quarter, taking no prisoners, sparing 
neither clergy nor laity, and spending the revenues 
of the Church on soldiers, to the deprivation of 
the poor." 

Class depravity, Class selfishness, Class 
insolence. Class pugnacity, marked the conduct of 
these incongruous churchmen. "In fact, the 
records of the time bear ample testimony to the 
rapine and violence, the flagrant crimes and de- 
fiant immorality of these princes of the Church. 
The only tribunal to which they were amenable 
was that of Rome. It required the courage of 
desperation to cause complaints to be made against 
them, and when such complaints were made, the 



Tribe and Class 195 

difficulty of proving the charges, the length to 
which proceedings were drawn out, and the 
notorious venality of the Roman curia, afforded 
virtual immunity." It is not intended to convey 
the impression that this corruption or distortion 
of Christian morals and practice was universal. 
It was not, but it w^as prevalent, and distinctly 
point to the ineradicable heritage of tribal man- 
ners and habits, which infiltrated the channels, 
offices, and aims of the Church, and with the 
viciousness of Class cupidity, hardened its temper 
into that harshness of feeling, which permitted, 
encouraged, and applauded the awful savagery of 
religious persecution. 

The tribal thirst for plunder, shown in every 
annal of tribal conquest, was not absent from the 
breast of the ecclesiastical chieftain. "Clement 
V, after his consecration at Lyons, made a prog- 
ress to Bordeaux, in which he and his retinue so 
effectually plundered the churches on the road 
that, after his departure, from Bourges, Arch- 
bishop Gilles, in order to support life, was obliged 
to present himself daily among his canons for a 
share in the distribution of provisions. England 
after the ignominious surrender of King John, was 
peculiarly subjected to papal extortion. Rich 
benefices were bestowed on foreigners, who made 
no pretext of residence, until the annual revenue 
thus withdrawn from the island was computed to 
amount to seventy thousand marks, or three times 
the income of the crown, and all resistance was 
suppressed by excommunications which disturbed 
the whole kingdom". 



196 Europe's Handicap — 

This violence belonged to the character of the 
times, but that character, however much it under- 
went progressive chastening and reduction left the 
irreducible imprint of its roughness, hardness, 
meanness, on the passions or nature of the church- 
men, and that character too was a legitimate in- 
heritance of tendencies from purely tribal days. 

The Church was demoralized in its temper by 
Class rapacity, and the resurgent superstitions of 
the wildmen, whose descendants filled its 
churches, spread over the mere physical processes 
of worship a supernatural efhcacy. That too was 
tribal; it belonged to the immaturity of the tribal 
mind, and suited the weakness of the tribal will. 
The mechanism of a performance served the pur- 
pose of a change of heart, as ''reciting, for the 
peace and prosperity of the Church, on bended 
knees, the Paternoster five times, in honor of the 
five wounds of Christ; the Ave Maria seven times, 
in honor of the seven joys of the Virgin, and other 
similar practices." 

Now however Heresy arose, how it is explained, 
what justified it — all of which belongs to the his- 
tory of the Church, amply displayed in books, — 
it is certain that it shocked the orthodox christian 
of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries 
as an impious resistance to authority, and due to 
the direct contrivance and instigation of the 
Devil. "To the Church this state of affairs was 
unbearable. It has always held the toleration of 
others to be persecution of itself. By the very law 
of its being it can brook no rivalry in its domina- 



Tribe and Class 197 

tion over the human soul ; and, in the present case, 
as toleration was slowly but surely leading to its 
destruction, it was bound by its sense of duty no 
less that of self preservation to put an end to a 
situation so abhorrent." 

Besides, more commercially considered, it meant 
subversion of place, overthrow of dominion, and 
withdraw^al of funds. It awoke the most desperate 
determination to exterminate it, on the part of 
the Church, which inherited the tribal force of 
purpose, the tribal barrenness of sympathy, and 
was a literal example of a Class oligarchy as well. 
The march of the assembled Lords and their 
armies upon the Albugensian heretics recast in a 
more moderated, more familiar mould, the out- 
pourings of the tribesmen in the warfare on plain 
and city, when they foraged the enemy's country, 
or began their devastating migrations; "many 
great nobles assumed the cross — the Duke of 
Burgundy and the Counts of Nevers, St. Pol, 
Auxerre, Montfort, Geneva, Poitiers, Forez, and 
others, with numerous bishops. With time there 
came large contingents from Germany, under the 
Dukes of Austria and Saxony, the Counts of Bar, 
of Juliers, and of Berg. Recruits were drawn from 
distant Bremen on the one hand, and Lombardy 
on the other, and we even hear of Slavonian barons 
leaving the original home of Catharism to combat 
it in the seat of its latest development. There 
was salvation to be had for the pious, knightly 
fame for the warrior, and spoil for the worldly." 

What followed — a tribal massacre! The walls 



198 Europe's Handicap — 

of the city of Beziers were carried — ''the army 
followed, and the legate's oath was fulfilled by a 
massacre almost without parallel in European his- 
tory. From infancy in arms to tottering age, not 
one was spared — seven thousand, it is said were 
slaughtered in the Church of Mary Magdalene to 
which they had fled for asylum — and the total 
number of slain is set down by the legate at nearly 
twenty thousand, which is more probable than the 
sixty thousand reported by less trustworthy 
chroniclers. A fervent Cistercian contemporary 
informs us that when Arnaud was asked whether 
the Catholics should be spared, he feared the 
heretics would escape by feigning orthodoxy, and 
fiercely replied, 'Kill them all, for God knows his 
own.' In the mad carnage and pillage the town 
was set on fire, and the sun of that awful July day 
closed on a mass of smouldering ruins and 
blackened corpses." 

As we accompany the steps of the historian 
along that darkened and sometimes supernally 
illuminated road of the Church's progress, more 
and more the primitive simplicity, earnestness, 
unselfish or even most heroic fidelity, of its mem- 
bers, changes, under tribal and Class inflictions 
into something obdurate, strained and exclusive. 
Persecution was at first repugnant to the sensi- 
tivity of the Church, and Mr. Lea assures us that 
in 385 the "first instance was given of judicial 
capital punishment for heresy, and the horror 
which it excited shows that it was regarded every- 
where as a hideous innovation". The later 



Tribe and Class 199 

exuberant growth of heresy had not alarmed the 
Church in the earlier centuries, nor stirred up the 
implacable antagonism which admonished the arm 
of the State and of the Church to act in unison for 
heresy's annihilation. And the moment rage — 
that concentrated venomous species of holy rage 
that shrivels into nothingness all liberal, all tender 
aspirations — appeared, the tribal temperament, 
pitiless, remorseless, sullen, or hideous with an 
incarnate demonism of cruelty, arose appallingly. 
Mr. Lea's very words suggest the conclusion 
strikingly; "the age moreover was a cruel one. 
The military spirit was everywhere dominant; 
men were accustomed to" rely upon force rather 
than on persuasion, and habitually looked on 
human suffering with indifference. The industrial 
spirit, which has softened modern manners and 
modes of thought, was as yet hardly known. We 
have only to look upon the atrocities of the 
criminal law of the Middle Ages to see how pitiless 
men were in their dealings with each other. The 
wheel, the caldron of boiling oil, burning alive, 
burying alive, flaying alive, tearing apart with wild 
horses, were the ordinary expedients by which the 
criminal jurist sought to deter crime, by frightful 
examples, which would make a profound impres- 
sion on a not over sensitive population." 

Class cruelty entered into combination with 
tribal ferocity in the blood of the people to 
accentuate and exaggerate the awful inflictions of 
physical suffering. Europe has not yet freed 
itself from its tribal barbarism, that insensitivity 



200 Europe's Handicap — 

to suffering, the vindictiveness of hate, the hungri- 
ness of stealth and rapine. Mr. Lea avers that as 
late as 1833 in England a child of nine was sen- 
tenced to be hanged for breaking a patched pane 
of glass, and stealing two pence worth of paint, 
while in its penal laws, even in its pleasures a 
barbaric brutality distinguished the english law, 
and the english holiday, as late as the eighteenth 
century. In the Inquisition "fanatic zeal, arbi- 
trary cruelty, and insatiable cupidity rivalled each 
other in building up a system unspeakably atro- 
cious." But while we beg to detect the indications 
of the tribal nature of their ancestors and the 
arrogance of Class self-love in the religious bigotry 
and in the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, this 
contention alone would afford only a partial ex- 
planation of some phenomena, connected with the 
latter, most depressing, sad, and odious. It is assist- 
ed though by another consideration momentously 
relevant, and a consideration too springing from 
tribal postulates. 

It is a universal habit of mind in tribal law to 
consider the accused, the prisoner, guilty, until he 
frees himself of the imputation. The attitude of 
an enlightened and humane court of justice is 
exactly the reverse; an accused man or woman is 
innocent until he or she is proven guilty, and while 
the difference of view may, in the statement, seem 
a trifling transposition of words, it in reality re- 
flects two opposite relations towards the prisoner 
almost immeasurably contrasted. The former 
view^ prefigures the government, or the trial judges, 



Tribe and Class 201 

committed to an attempt to prove the prisoner 
guilty, because its initial conception of his position 
is that of a culprit, the latter quite naturally makes 
the court an impartial judge of the evidence. And 
this prejudgment works almost disastrously for 
the safeguarding and vindication of innocence. 
This tribal relation to the prisoner is characteristic 
of European law. It is unfair, and clouds a 
reputation at once with the obloquy of an unveri- 
fied but accredited suspicion. In this country 
precisely the opposite obtains, as might be almost 
instinctively predicted. It belongs to the whole 
expression and instinct of our decent and humane 
culture. 

Now in the Inquisition, the feature of its 
abominable and loathsome process of secret trial, 
that gave all of its deliberations the actual 
character of a foregone conclusion, was this violent 
assumption that the accused was necessarily 
guilty. This evoked that merciless exercise of 
dexterity, craft, and intimidation, the excruciating 
process of an examination, wherein the fortified 
skill, cunning, and determination of the inquisitor 
overwhelmed, confused, and prostrated the victim 
of these barbarous — albeit technically provided 
with and surrounded by provisions against in- 
justice — ordeals. 

"The accused was thus prejudged. He was 
assumed to be guilty, or he would not have been 
put on trial, and virtually his only mode of escape 
was by confessing the charges made against him, 
abjuring heresy, and accepting whatever punish- 



202 Europe's Handicap — 

ment might be imposed on him in the shape of 
penance. Persistent denial of guilt and assertion 
of orthodoxy, when there was evidence against 
him, rendered him an impenitent obstinate heretic, 
to be abandoned to the secular arm and consigned 
to the stake." (Lea). 

Now this was all tribal, savage, conclusively 
barbarous and aboriginal. It represented the 
natural and actual prolongation into the pro- 
cesses of civilization of the ancient tribal custom, 
and of that spirit which has, and does to-day, 
obscure or even obliterate the recognition of the 
primal principles of a wise, just, and liberated 
human relationship under the forms of our artifice 
of communal government. The distortion of a 
proper process of law, in the inquisitorial acts of 
that distant time, is significant. "Confession of 
heresy thus became a matter of vital importance, 
and no effort was deemed too great, no means too 
repulsive, to secure it. This became the centre of 
the inquisitorial process, and it is deserving of 
detailed consideration, not only because it formed 
the basis of prodecure in the Holy Office, but also 
because of the vast and deplorable influence which 
it exercised for five centuries on the whole judicial 
system of Continental Europe." (Lea). 

As regards the perpetuation of tribal legal 
custom in Europe Sir Henry Sumner Maine says 
(Early History of Institutions) *T am not at all 
prepared to deny that recent researches, and par- 
ticularly those into old French customary law, 
render it easier to believe than it once was that 



Tribe and Class 203 

portions of primitive or aboriginal custom survive 
the most desolating conquests". It is an abor- 
iginal taint of the legal disposition of cases to found 
their procedure '*on the monstrous assumption 
that plaintiffs are always right and defendants 
always in the wrong" (Maine). Maine con- 
tinues "Yet the assumption would not perhaps 
have struck the earliest authors of legal improve- 
ment as altogether monstrous, nor could they have 
quite comprehended the modern principle which 
compels the complainant to establish at all events 
3, prima facie case. * * * the old assumption that 
complainants are presumably in the right was 
kept long alive among uS, and had much to do 
with the obstinate dislike of lawyers to allowing 
prisoners to be defended by Counsel". 

H. William Conn after writing (Social Heredity 
and Social Evolution), "in some races even till 
recent times, a trial consisted in summoning 
witnesses to swear to their belief that the accused 
was innocent or guilty: and if there were more 
witnesses who thought him innocent he was 
acquitted, while a majority on the other side would 
convict him", seems inclined to consider The Drey- 
fus case tried before the modernized court of 
France an illustration of an atavistic reversal to 
this measure of ancient tribal law. 

The injustice of arbitrary punishment, the in- 
fliction of impossible tests for innocence, the 
savage resentment against injury, the insolence of 
the King, "who constantly took the lands of the 
defendant into his hands or seized his goods, simply 



204 Europe's Handicap — 

to compel or perfect his submission to the royal 
jurisdiction", were all natural aspects of tribal and 
class-practice law, and they remained for a long 
time literally in the tribal and class practice of 
Europe, while the temperament they had developed 
with them and the fashion of mind that resists 
change, or secession, or heresy, imbued the Church 
with that implacable and execrable intensity of 
hate, as well as of dogmatic tyranny, which most 
faithfully reflects in its august courts the unescap- 
able heritage of the passions, prejudices, and 
cruelty, of TRIBE and CLASS. 

It is only a collateral contribution to our argu- 
ment, but it is not a delusion to consider Religious 
Bigotry and the Inquisition products of Tribe and 
Class. If anywhere to-day the incommunicable 
graces of the Christian religion will most beauti- 
fully blossom, and bear the richest and most abun- 
dant fruit, it is where Tribe and Class do not 
exist — in these United States of America. 



CHAPTER VII 
The Present War 

In tribal natures it is impossible to overestimate 
the persistency and the obduracy of racial com- 
binations. In the present war, in philosophically 
solving its cause, the overt act of Germany, so 
pertinaciously emphasized and displayed, is far 
less important in its determination, than the 
political and ethnological prejudice, prejudgments, 
and ambitions which precipitated it, and inevit- 
^ ably would have precipitated it, no matter 
who had been king of Germany. International 
relations, the reciprocal sense of danger existing 
for many years, previously between the countries, 
which became involved, and that indeterminate 
element of superstition as to chances and luck, 
which influences nations as well as individuals — 
and tribal nations particularly — in making a 
critical choice are to be weighed, as causes leading 
rulers to act in emergencies, not so much by legal- 
ized opinion, as by a calculation of probabilities. 
There are immediate and ultimate causes of war, 
and while a strictly technical judgment might con- 
demn a nation in yielding to an immediate impulse 
to make war, a deeper-sighted review might dis- 
cover in the ultimate cause an excuse for the 
priority of offence for the same nation. 

War is Murder, and War is Hell. This is un- 



206 Europe's Handicap — 

questioned. The murder may be criminal or sim- 
ply justifiable homicide. In either case it means 
DEATH. It is incontrovertible that war is hellish, 
and the thoroughness of its infernal invention is 
presumably intended to make it shorter. An 
amiable war or a war conducted upon parlor meth- 
ods of deference or precedence is inconceivable. 
There were some buffoon wars in the Middle Ages, 
stage performances of pasquinade gesture, and 
inoffensive pantomime, but — Well there is no 
justification for cynicism. Civilization has con- 
structed some general rules governing the conduct 
of war, and Science has wonderfully ameliorated 
the sufferings and consequences of wounds. 
International Law has a respectable footing, and , 
the surgeon, the field hospital, the trained nurse, 
the, commissariat are incomputably glorious. A 
nation that goes to war means to win; on its 
winning depends its safety perhaps its existence, 
and war is to be so conducted that whether there 
is a minimum or a maximum of loss, in money, in 
property, in life, there remains at least victory, or 
something like victory. To-day something else 
counts, or is supposed to count, and that is Reputa- 
tion. A good name has a commercial value at its 
lowest estimate, and a moral weight at its highest, 
and that the latter is envied by governments is 
a substantial tribute to some ingrained intuitions 
towards righteousness. 

The present war is full of horrors. That does 
not exclude their perpetrators from human com- 
panionship, so far as those horrors are a means to 



Tribe and Class 207 

an end, and do not involve torture. Every 
instinct of sanity, of manhood, of religion, forbids 
torture. All suffering is a torture, but the implica- 
tion here is unmistakable. It means intentional, 
improvised, physical, painful mutilation, as burn- 
ing, impaling, crucifying, stabbing, breaking, 
starving, etc. Again war absolves the sub- 
scriber to a treaty with an antagonist from blame 
in breaking it. War repeals all treaties. And 
the absolution is so drastic that it may include 
toleration for the breaking of other treaties with 
other nations than the immediate enemy, if again 
thereby from the infraction, benefits accrue to the 
trespasser in a struggle, the latter regards as 
critical. 

In judging of this war, and in framing any 
opinion of the apportionable guilt and its distribu- 
tion, it is necessary to recall the impression made 
by the review, we have imperfectly prepared, of 
some of the conditions of Tribe and of Class which 
have afflicted Europe for some two thousand or 
more years, and whose heritage of perversions or of 
selfishness, the present Europe must and does 
assume. 

The wars of Europe seldom challenge our en- 
thusiasm as loftily conceived and disinterestedly 
executed crusades for the enfranchisement of a 
people, the protection of the weak, or the uplifting 
of the unfortunate, at least so far as the wars con- 
sidered, were national efforts. The uprising of 
downtrodden and submerged people, the repeated 
attempts to cast off vicious and tyrannical yokes, 



208 Europe's Handicap — 

the armed protests against personal despotism, the 
struggles of enslaved populations, have indeed 
been frequent, but these disturbances advertised 
the corruption or the harshness of governments, 
whose iniquities the restless subjects of these insti- 
tutions have striven to overthrow. The wars have 
been tribal, and behind tribe, imbibing its preju- 
dices, and profiting by its successes, was the vast 
domination of class. 

To-day the necessity of individual liberty, over 
and above what is already granted, for the most 
part, in Europe, is not urgent. There is a pretty 
well distributed liberty, and the democratic indul- 
gence of voting is widely conceded, but still 
Europe remains tribal, and still the overwhelming 
preponderance of class motives outweighs the plain 
interests of the people. For, at this very moment, 
were the whole question of Europe's peace to be 
transferred from the chambers of the kings, the 
emperors, the czars, the titled ministries, and the 
exclusive organized bodies of invested capital, to 
the occupants of the streets, and the inmates of 
the villages and humble homes, it seems most 
likely that, by a unanimous decision, it would be 
at once decreed that the war should STOP. 
Whatever the ultimate modifications it might 
cause, short of ruinous contraction for the con- 
testants, or of some exorbitance in the claims of 
belligerents for indemnity, the people of the great 
electorates in these countries would end the awful 
conflict. In Italy indeed the tribal spirit per- 
meates the populace it would seem, and, with no 



Tribe and Class 209 

ostensible motives for participation in the general 
carnage, lured by the chance of territorial gain, and 
the purely racial impulse of retaliation, this mis- 
guided land — already suffering from the scarcely 
forgotten results of former expensive experiments 
at expansion — plunges into the sanguinary melee. 

This present war is the complete exemplifica- 
tion of the Handicap — Tribe and Class — from 
which, for centuries, this unfortunate Europe has 
suffered, an exemplification of the unescapable 
menace of rivalry and aggression which resides in 
its composition, exemplification of that play of 
racial imagination which fosters the designs of 
more or less arbitrary rulers, who conceive of 
master schemes in the evolution of master and 
world-subduing empires, or kingdoms or sovereign- 
ties. Bismarck understood his Europe perfectly. 
He was part of it, emblematic of it. He believed 
in it, and was affiliated with its instincts, its ten- 
dencies, its lineage. He knew that so long "as 
there are so many pike in the European carp pond, 
Germany could not with safety be a carp". 

In the process of a polemic dissection of the 
present European crisis the underlying protasis of 
Europe must be assigned an almost overwhelming 
weight, so that, under that control, the accusation 
of guilt for individual agents, while fully justifying 
condemnation, in a strong measure, exonerate 
them from shameless crime. Europe's Tribal and 
Class condition underlies her chronic tumult and 
restlessness and disorder. 

Germany and her Kaiser have been, In the 



210 Europe's Handicap — 

opinion of all englishmen — with one notable and 
possibly malevolent exception — blamed vocifer- 
ously, and with burning excoriations of means, 
purpose, and conduct, for the entire trouble. It 
is certainly a pardonable feeling, as the later con- 
sequences of the war have been — for England — 
and all of the Allies, bitter and ruinous, and strik- 
ingly insulting. And that the War is what it is, 
so measurelessly vast, so portentous in contrivance, 
so destructive and doggedly persistent is, beyond 
question only attributable to Germany, while new 
terrors, involving the slaughter of the defenceless 
or of non-combatants, has added a horrific sinister 
madness, as of an unloosened pack of demons, or 
the orgiac onset of embattled Furies. 

The ends of war are stern and overmastering, 
and its instrumentalities pitiless. The sufferings 
in this war have not been a whit more than they 
have been in innumerable wars before this one, 
but to-day our wholesomeness of sympathy with 
suffering, makes every aspect of suffering, insuffer- 
able. These questions — all of them — while they 
exasperate our temper are irrelevant. Germany 
has imparted a strange and titanic shape to war, 
and not unmixed with paralyzing fears, but DID 
SHE CAUSE IT? Did any one cause it? Is not 
this war fundamentally a reiteration of the 
political unstable equilibrium of Europe, its myotic 
infection of racial egotism and Class egoisms? 
The question is not an academic one, it is not a 
quibble. It truly gathers up the expression of 
what these chapters have conveyed — we admit in 



Tribe and Class 211 

hardly more than a symptomatic way — of the 
irreconcilable animosities of races, with the ac- 
companying explosions of tribal brutality, and the 
overweening habit of the coercive pragnatism of 
Kings, or anything that is allied to, or stands for 
them. To-day, In Europe, Kings are not the same 
inexcusable despots that they once were, and the 
mere vulgar excrescences of Class rudeness and 
meanness, are sensibly abated, but yet, in their 
somewhat sterilized capacity for mischief, they 
exert a peculiar disturbing influence. The mo- 
ment a King subtends the vision of men and 
women — all, as humans, more or less imaginative, 
and always in Europe tribally hypnotized — he 
becomes a fetich, a symbol of a national ideal, 
which each man feels himself ideally and really 
constrained to worship and maintain. This gener- 
ates a peculiar hardness of self-assertion, that, like 
an Ingested nucleus In an organism, keeps the 
national tissues irritable. ''We may", says W. A. 
Phillips, (The Confederation of Europe) "hold 
what opinion we like about the reasonableness or 
unreasonableness of these particularlst ambitions; 
the point is that they exist. They exist even In 
the ranks of the adherents of the peace movement, 
whose cosmopolitanism is often subject to serious 
reservations." 

Now, to start quite early enough, let us consider 
the formation of the Holy Alliance, a grouping of 
three major powers in Europe, which was intended 
to sway its affairs authoritatively, and keep its 
peace. That reactionary assemblage of crowns 



212 Europe^s Handicap — 

took its rise in 1815, after the expulsion of Napo- 
leon, and when the opportunity seemed favorable 
to consolidate imperial power for the perpetual 
suppression of popular movements, whose excita- 
tion might again upset and, as it were, dissolve 
Europe. Later at Troppau and at Laibach it was 
more perfectly established as The Holy Alliance. 
It was formally conceived as a consecrated com- 
pact between Russia, Austria, and Prussia, ^Hn 
the name of the Most Holy and Indivisible Trinity,'' 
to keep things quiet in Europe, and quiet along 
preconcerted and conservative lines. A promi- 
nent, perhaps a ruling personality in it, was that 
of Alexander I, Emperor of Russia, of whom the 
famous minister of England Castlereagh, (Robert 
Stewart), wrote, ''it is impossible to doubt the 
Emperor's sincerity in his views, which he dilates 
upon w^th a religious rhapsody. Either he is 
sincere, or hypocrisy certainly assumes a more 
abominable garb than she ever yet was clothed 
in", and he describes this melodramatic and useless 
gentleman placing his hand on his heart, and look- 
ing up to heaven, and declaring that he felt him- 
self so tremendously inspired by religion and 
conscience, that it would be simply impossible for 
him to do anything wrong, or think anything 
unjust. 

Let the reader remember that, as summarized 
by Phillips, the Holy Alliance asserted that "the 
system of Europe was a general association which 
had for foundation the Treaties of Vienna and 
Paris, for conservative principle the fraternal 



Tribe and Class 213 

unions of the Allied Powers, for aim the guarantee 
of all recognized rights. This system which 
guaranteed the best interests of the great Euro- 
pean family, was the work not of any man but of 
Providence. Its moral support lay in the Quad- 
ruple Alliance and the Holy Alliance, its material 
support in the armed occupation of France. 
Since this had come to an end, more moral support 
was needed. This was not to be sought in the 
renewal of engagements already taken; for to 
swear too much weakens the force of oaths. It 
must be sought in the elements constituting the 
actual European system, and in a combination 
which in the eyes of all the world would make the 
cohesion of the system evident, necessary, and 
indissoluble. These elements were the Quadruple 
Alliance and the General Alliance, considered, in 
reference to the case under discussion, the first as 
a principle, and the second as its consequence. 
The compact which consecrated and defined the 
first was the treaty of November 20, 1815. The 
General Alliance was to be sought in the Final Act 
of Vienna and the subsequent acts signed at Paris 
in 1815." 

What was the result? Did it perpetuate peace? 
Did it supply a rational means for allaying discord 
and reconciling divergent or opposing interests? 
Was its components strictly faithful to the larger 
and progressive aims of national life? Did it 
bring the scrutiny of a wide prevision into its 
councils, or adapt its theory to the evolution of 
human idealism in government? By no means. 



214 Europe's Handicap — 

It went to pieces before the failure of its con- 
structive elements to agree, before the disintegrat- 
ing influence of England's rejection of its au- 
tocracy, and more conclusively before the Revolu- 
tion of 1830. It did not survive the Crimean War. 
It was a Class creation, and it was a dream. The 
disorders of Europe springing from natural tribal 
instincts of resentment at foreign domination, in 
Italy, the incompetency of Class rule in Spain, as 
evinced in the misgovernment of her colonies, 
sharply contravened the oligarchic conceptions of 
its founders, who attempted to stabilize old forms 
of control, and who themselves fell out, when the 
interests of their separate dynasties, or the swelling 
pride of national aims, brought the signatories of 
The Holy Alliance, into fraternal rivalries and 
conflict. 

Mr. Phillips says, "the attempt failed, but it 
left certain permanent effects — the tradition of 
respect for the obligation of international engage- 
ments, the impetus thereby given to the study and 
the application of international law, and the 
abiding hope of the ultimate establishment of an 
effective international system. Without the Holy 
Alliance, as we shall see, there would have been no 
Hague Conferences." Well, as to the Hague 
Conference, does it now, at this moment, loom 
very largely in the eyes of men as determinative of 
factional collisions in Europe? 

The permanent possibility of Peace in Europe 
can be attained by its abolition of Tribe and Class, 
what they stand for, what they inculcate, the 



Tribe and Class 215 

atmosphere and technique they engender, the 
whole retinue of fatalistic dreams they nurture. 
Were the whole world democraticized, there 
would still remain the ineradicable human nature 
with its faults and excesses, and because of them 
wars might ceaselessly arise. But at least the 
organization of government would tend to dis- 
courage war, because radically — to be very frank — 
men would not care to, nor be willing to fight. 
With Trihe and Class gone, the commercial day 
would dawn, and — there can be no doubt about 
it — it would also be a day of peaceful inclinations. 
The way to peace is through the eradication of the 
temperament that makes for war, — that tempera- 
ment is paramount and persistent in Tribe and 
Class. Eliminate these through the process of 
democracy and through popular education, 
through the manifold activities of popular govern- 
ment, as seen and felt in the United States, and the 
gradual extinction of wars would follow as 
naturally as under the recurrent play of sunlight 
and of heat the sour and acrid juices of the fruits 
mellow into nutritious and palatable fluids. 

Before reviewing further the purpose and his- 
tory of The Holy Alliance, a glance at previous 
attempts at peace-producing agencies in Europe — 
permitted us by the excellent resume of Mr. 
Phillips — has interest, and is instructive as illus- 
trating the hopelessness of the plans proposed, 
plans which do not involve a structural reogran- 
ization of European communities. They could 
not. Europe must pass through the nepionic and 



216 Europe's Handicap — 

immature phases of a tribal and class existence, 
until, under the tutelage of experience, and under 
the educational example of this republic, it puts 
aside childish things, and graduates into the man- 
hood of a just equality, when, to quote Lord Acton, 
(Correspondence), we see ''the doctrine of equality 
spring into omnipotence, see it change the prin- 
ciples of administration, justice, international law, 
taxation, representation, property, and religion." 

The name of Henry IV of France is associated 
with the Grand Design, which postulated a Chris- 
tian Republic. There was to be a General Council, 
consisting of a perpetual Senate of sixty-four 
commissioners, from each Great Power, two from 
each lesser Power, renewable every three years. 
''The function of this Senate was to be to deliber- 
ate on affairs as they arose; to discuss matters of 
common interest; to settle disputes; to examine 
into and determine all civil, political, and religious 
suits either in Europe itself or arising out of the 
relations of Europe with the world outside." 

Mr. Phillips attributes the vitality of all subse- 
quent schemes to this utterly barren proposition. 
There was no real vitality in any of them. They 
were academic, made-to-order police regulations, 
deduced from the authors' historic knowledge and 
the plausible device of some sort of absolute 
superintendency, explicitly artificial, implicitly 
oppressive, for as Rousseau said; "One cannot 
guarantee princes against the revolt of their sub- 
jects without at the same time guaranteeing sub- 



Tribe and Class 217 

jects against the tyranny of princes. Otherwise 
the institution could not possibly survive." 

Then followed Emer'ic Cruce's Le Nouveau CyiteCy 
the Grotius' De jure belli et pads. Perhaps the 
most significant of its sequelae was the Projet de 
paix perpetuelle of the Abbe de St. Pierre, from 
which again we are told to believe, sprang Emperor 
Alexander I's Holy Alliance and even Napoleon's 
Confederation, the latter bound together, "by 
unity of codes, principles, opinions, feelings, and 
interests." The destructive criticisms had been 
uttered by Voltaire — even if exaggeratedly pic- 
turesque — "the peace imagined by the Abbe de 
St. Pierre is a chimera, 'which will not subsist 
between princes any more than between elephants 
and rhinoceroses, between wolves and dogs. 
Carnivorous animals will always tear each other 
to pieces at the first opportunity." 

It was really reserved for the philosopher 
Immanuel Kant {Zum ewigen Frieden) to enunciate 
a self-regulative principle, an auto-directive force 
which ensures peace by a natural process of logic 
and feeling. "This basis he finds in the develop- 
ment of enlightened self-interest among the 
peoples, and the growth of the moral idea, which 
has already made men open to the influence of the 
mere conception of law, as though this in itself 
possessed physical power." 

These schemes, culminating in The Holy Al- 
liance (which we beg to examine a little further) 
were simply systems of mechanical restraints and 
balances, threatening also to become rigid and 



218 Europe's Handicap — 

inelastic despotic systems as well. They were 
crib-works of juxtaposition, and reciprocal beams, 
whose architects would watch their preservation, 
and who would insert in them from time to time a 
new brace, or knock out a useless one from time to 
time, as they think fit, or a constellation of radiant 
points not bound together by any natural law of 
gravity in their movement, but dangerously 
explosive by reason of the ignition of their content, 
(tribe and Class), which in an instant throws the 
whole group into disarray, not unattended with 
conflagration and collisions. Now whether con- 
sidered as a joinery, or as a nebula, all of these 
schemes reveal the root fallacy of European 
political umpirage, the final reference to an 
Aristocracy, to a grouped order of inviolate suc- 
cession, (in the Abbe de St. Pierre's projet there 
was no provision made for any representation 
other than that of the sovereigns), or to some 
fabric of officialdom, not created by the people, not 
consanguineous with the people, and not respon- 
sive to the normal human antipathy (to-day) to 
loss and death, since on this official fabric the 
engineers of national destiny stand far above "the 
dust and smoke of this dim world which men call 
Earth," and, being too far off the ground, miss the 
meanings of simple and practical relations. The 
conditions of a World Peace do not come with ob- 
servation, their potency must be found in the 
human heart and mind, and result as imperiously, 
as does the bubbling water in a valley spring from 
an irresistible pressure in the surrounding hills. 



Tribe and Class 219 

Tribe and Class are the chronic irritants of all 
national excitations. 

The Holy Alliance as a determined theory for 
the control of European affairs, and as a definite 
compact, solemnly confirmed by the signatures of 
the rulers of Russia, Austria and Prussia was pro- 
claimed on September 26th, 1815, by Emperor 
Alexander of Russia, "at a great review of the 
Allied troops held on the plain of Vertus near 
Chalons," and all Christian sovereigns were to be 
invited to join. 

Two things contributed to the erection of this 
portentous international fabric of control; one 
was the French Revolution- and Napoleon, and the 
second was the singular personality of Alexander I 
of Russia. The French Revolution and Napoleon 
had overrun Europe, violently shaken ancient 
political traditions, and, as a hard reality, de- 
stroyed the boundaries of states, and inordinately 
enlarged those of France. Europe was threatened 
with a physical and moral upset which defied 
tradition, and quite completely ruined its con- 
federative ideals. That needed correction. 

In Alexander of Russia a character appeared 
who was a peculiar, but easily analyzed, mixture of 
lofty motives and conservative or even reactionary 
prejudices and habits. He was to ''conciliate the 
traditional Russian policy of aggrandizement with 
generous ideas, by making the Russian passion for 
glory and supremacy serve the purposes of the 
general good of humanity". Alexander was a 
mystic, in a way, a dreamer, set on a throne, im- 



220 Europe's Handicap — 

pressionable to religious influences, and emotion- 
ally sentimental, but inherently rooted in the 
tenacity of his adhesion to all the forms and con- 
viction of class, and pervasively vain and childish. 
"Thus it was that Alexander, though at times he 
seemed to realize its absurdity, was a victim all 
his life to what Czartoryski calls ^Paradomania, 
that epidemic malady of princes.' " 

Alexander felt himself fatalistically, as Class 
people do, a predestined benefactor of men, some- 
thing moulded to a great end by the Creator. He 
perhaps with Metternich inaugurated the over- 
tures between the Allies, upon the repulse and 
eviction of Napoleon, for the formation of some 
sort of regulative bund, which would watch things, 
keep everything straight, and permissively en- 
courage beautiful thoughts and beautiful relations. 
The Holy Alliance, as a police system, owed much 
to Metternich; as an incubator of magnanimous 
intentions it owed everything to Alexander. 
England opposed the Alliance, for she feared 
Russia would become too powerful in European 
influence, and that hypothetical condition, The 
Balance of Power — only conceivable under Class 
and Tribal states — would become disarranged to 
her disadvantage. 

The magnificent plan developed slowly amid a 
cloud of recriminations, and the emergence of 
claims and counter claims, through a succession of 
historic conventions wherein the diplomats of the 
Powers consummately exhausted their skill upon 
each other, and left volumes of keen characteriza- 



Tribe and Class 221 

tions, every one of which, by the very force of its 
analysis, proves the ambiguity and precariousness 
of all European relations. There was the First 
Peace of Paris, then the great Congress of Vienna, 
then the Second Treaty of Paris, and these con- 
ventions slowly placed Europe back into its ante- 
Napoleonic status, with a German Confederation 
of small states, and the larger Powers mollified at 
least, by various acquisitions, while France formed 
a liberal host for their armies — in the case of the 
Prussians ungovernable and rapacious — and an al- 
most insoluble dilemma for their diplomats, some 
of whom might have wished to tear her to pieces. 

It was Castlereagh who wrote to his govern- 
ment; 'T much suspect that neither Austria, 
Prussia, nor the smaller Powers are anxious to end 
the present situation. Their armies are paid, 
clothed and supported by France, and the British 
subsidies are free to go into their own pockets, 
which nothing can deprive them of previous to 
April 1, 1816. The Austrians have marched 
Bianchi's corps into Provence, in order to feed 
upon that poor but loyal province. The Prus- 
sians have 280,000 men in France, for whom they 
draw rations. The Bavarians have brought troops 
from Munich to the Loire in wagons at a moment 
when their service in the field was out of the 
question, the transport of these troops being, of 
course, at the expense of the country." 

Phillips tells us; ''under the terms of the treaty 
(The Second Treaty of Paris), France was to 
remain under the tutelage of the Alliance. Pend- 



222 Europe's Handicap — 

ing the paying off of the indemnity her territory 
was to be occupied by an allied army under the 
Duke of Wellington, and though this was not 
mentioned in the treaty, the Council of the 
Ministers of the Powers continued its sessions in 
Paris, keeping in close touch with Wellington on 
the one hand, and the French Cabinet on the 
other. Not till, after a period of this straight- 
waist-coat, she had given proof of having been 
cured of her revolutionary madness, would France 
be restored into the bosom of the family of 
nations." 

The Holy Alliance was published, and in 1818 
the Conference at Aix-la-Chapelle was held to ex- 
pand or perpetuate its principles, which were 
intended to insure a permanent peace through the 
wise oversight and efficacious interference of the 
great Powers, whose mutual amity seemed never 
to be questioned. It was again the astute Cas- 
tlereagh whose merciless analysis exposed the 
narrow and easily perverted provisions of a group- 
ing of nations practically designed to stabilize 
Class government. 

"The idea of an Alliance solidaire, by which 
each state shall be bound to support the state of 
succession, government and possession within all 
other states, from violence and attack, upon condi- 
tion of receiving for itself, a similar guarantee, 
must be understood as morally implying the 
previous establishment of such a system of general 
government as may secure and enforce upon all 
kings and nations an internal system of peace and 



Tribe and Class 223 

justice. Till the mode of constructing such a sys- 
tem shall be devised, the consequence is inadmis- 
sible, as nothing would be more immoral or more 
prejudicial to the character of government gener- 
ally, than the idea that their force was collectively 
to be prostituted to the support of established 
power, without any consideration of the extent to 
which it was abused." 

England at this point championed the independ- 
ence and the incorporation of France in the 
Alliance, for England really apprehended the pre- 
ponderant influence of eastern Europe, and her 
insistence upon a more elastic and adjustable 
status of all the powersf furnished her with a 
technical chance to make her own alliance in case 
of rupture. For instance it was impossible to pre- 
dict when Russia might be overcome by her recur- 
rent hunger for Turkey. And now the completed 
outlines of a European Congress or Council of 
Nations actually solidified into a concrete fact, as 
a Court of Last Resort, for the arbitrament of 
international and even intranational questions, for 
it was surprising how quickly the governments 
turned to the Alliance for direction, as though in- 
capable of determining their own domestic ques- 
tions, a juvenility of condition springing from 
absence of real self-government. "It is clear", 
says Phillips, "that at this period the Alliance was 
looked upon, even by British statesmen, as some- 
thing more than a mere union of the Great Powers 
for preserving peace, on the basis of the treaties; 
and in effect during its short session the Confer- 



224 Europe's Handicap — 

ence acted, not only as a European representative 
body, but as a sort of European Supreme Court, 
which heard appeals and received petitions of all 
kinds from sovereigns and their subjects alike". 

The Holy Alliance was tolerably well inten- 
tioned as a device for the forcible retention of 
peace in Europe. It participated in a double set of 
intentions however; one purely secular, reaction- 
ary, opportunist, and materialistic, (certainly not 
ideal), and represented by that superb dialectician 
and hair-splitter, Metternich, who was one — in his 
own words — "positively contrary to the spirit of 
abstract analysis". The second group was em- 
bodied in Alexander of Russia, which aimed at 
sublime generalizations, and a kind of deistic 
superintendence, under whose control men and 
nations became transparently just and beautiful. 
But in fact the Holy Alliance was a convention of 
Class, a cenacle of crowns and sceptres, hedged 
with armies, and while yielding to a theoretical 
acceptance of liberal propositions in civics, hope- 
lessly fixed, from association, training, and interest 
in the systems of repression and alignment — in 
the Class system. 

Alexander had proclaimed his belief in liberty, 
"limited by the principles of order," but it re- 
quired no exorbitant exhibition of discontent either 
in his own country, or in others, to suddenly 
awaken the latent antipathy of a monarchical 
mind to anything more democratic than "order", 
protected by "divine right". 

Revolution in Greece, violent disorders in Spain, 



Tribe and Class 225 

insurrection in Naples, and the problem of Turkey 
— always insistent and at intervals eruptive — 
developed a wide difference of opinion among the 
statesmen, as to the procedure to be taken in the 
face of an evident unrest. The Carlsbad Decrees 
forbade liberal demonstrations in the Confedera- 
tion, Austria proposed to discipline her mutinous 
possessions in Italy, France wished to intervene in 
Spain, and England watched with undissimulated 
anxiety the course of events in Turkey, where she 
certainly did not wish Russian intervention, while 
in Russia the mutiny of the Guard in St. Peters- 
burg, revealed, as with a flash of lightning, the 
hidden barbarian in the he'art of Alexander, who 
considered the sentences of the court-martial as 
too lenient, and ordered that the ringleaders of the 
mutiny — two corporals and five poor privates — 
should run a gauntlet between two lines of 
soldiers armed with sticks. "The sentence was of 
course equivalent to one of death under torture" 
(Phillips). 

The conferences at Troppau and Laibach con- 
firmed the anticipations of liberal critics, that the 
Holy Alliance intended, or by the force of circum- 
stances would become, an intractable despotism, 
and that, inspired by a "morality based on 
bayonets", it would fasten on Europe the fetters 
of an intolerable state — sciolism. Then came the 
Congress of Verona. 

It was a sumptuous occasion with crowns, uni- 
forms, and titles the corporeal presentation of the 
glories of Class, and there dwelt in it the spirit of 



226 Europe's Handicap — 

monarchical dispositions, palliated, let us say, in a 
measure, by the English aversion to the dictatorship 
of national affairs by self-constituted meddlers. 
The immediate subject of discussion was the libera- 
tion by armed intervention of Ferdinand VII of 
Spain, from emprisonment. France under Louis 
XVIII was eager to send her armies into the dis- 
tracted country, and Alexander was not unwilling 
to lead the invasion with his own army, in this 
moral rebuke of disorder. 

The indirection of motives and pretences ap- 
peared at once. Austria at first joined hands with 
England in discouraging so wholesale a repression, 
but, with the Czar once diverted from this idea, 
she approved an endorsement of the French view, 
because "the German Powers had no interest in 
the particular question of Spain; they did not 
want war, and least of all a war which would have 
involved the passage of a Russian army across 
their territories; but they were, above all, anxious 
to distract Alexander's attention from the affairs 
of Turkey, where lay the most immediate danger 
of Russian aggression, and for this purpose it was 
necessary to humour him in the matter of the inter- 
vention in Spain, if only to keep him 'grouped' " 
(Phillips). 

It was only a fresh illustration of the enforced 
hypocrisy of states, constantly maneuvering for a 
positional advantage, under the stimulus of 
bureaucrats and kings. 

Then succeeded the question of the revolt of the 
Spanish American colonies, and the abhorrent 



Tribe and Class 227 

erection there of a phalanx of democracies, whose 
very existence disparaged the venerable institu- 
tions of Europe. It was the professed intention of 
the Holy Alliance to Interrupt the spread of this 
political heresy in the New World, that led to the 
proclamation of the Monroe Doctrine, conceived 
and verbally expressed by John Quincy Adams, 
the Secretary of State under President Monroe, a 
proclamation that coincided, (Canning did not 
originate the Doctrine), with the not too disin- 
terestedly candid views of the English minister 
George Canning. 

After the Conference at Verona, the Holy 
Alliance no longer remained a political cynosure, 
and In the later disturbances and war-clouds, and 
before the Iconoclastic aggressive movement of 
German centralization, vanished, to be finally re- 
placed by the complete recrudescence of the old 
make-shift, the Balance of Power, which after 
uneasy oscillations, was formulated as the Triple 
Alliance and the Triple Entente, whose fate now 
hangs In the larger and more perilous Balance of 
War, though for a long time the three eastern 
empires preserved a sentimental solidarity. 

The language of W. A. Phillips, who has guided 
these short pages. In this last review of the Holy 
Alliance, may well be quoted; "the 'sublime con- 
ception' of the Emperor Alexander, the visionary 
good in the pursuit of which he had neglected his 
duties to his own people, had proved itself the stuff 
that dreams are made of. His attempt to realize 
a Confederation of the World, had ended In draw- 



228 Europe's Handicap — 

ing the Old World, worn out as it seemed with 
cataclysmic convulsions, farther apart from that 
New World, of which the fiery youth proved a 
centrifugal force too strong to be resisted. As 
for the Confederation of Europe, from the moment 
that Great Britain decided 'to revolve in her own 
orbit', the harmonious cohesion of the European 
system became impossible, and after the Revolu- 
tion of July 1830 it broke definitively into two 
opposing groups. On the one side were the two 
Western Liberal Powers, Great Britain and 
France, under whose active encouragement the 
forces of nationalism and constitutional liberty 
developed amid wars and revolutions, until the 
system established at Vienna had been shattered. 
On the other side were the three Powers who had 
signed the Troppau Protocol, Austria, Russia, and 
Prussia, united in a Holy Alliance which, under 
the influence of the Iron Tsar, Nicholas I, 
narrowed and hardened into a close league of 
which the object was to crush out, within the limits 
of its sphere, all motions towards national inde- 
pendence or constitutional change." 

The Holy Alliance strengthened the reactionary 
movements in Europe, and stimulated the mori- 
bund impulses of Class, amusingly illustrated in 
the powdered queus of the soldiers of the Elector 
of Hesse-Cassel, and less amusingly acknowledged 
in the denunciation of the subjects of Mecklenberg 
as serfs. The three Emperors were held by it 
together in a circuit of sympathy, that discouraged 
the liberals, and narrowed the area of popular 



Tribe and Class 229 

demands. But the exultant return to power of 
the principles of restrictive government and the 
careless affectations of indifference to the renewed 
petitions for civil rights, precipitated new confu- 
sions. The Revolutions of 1830 were not too 
successful in Germany, but they accomplished 
something in France, and these abortive efforts 
were in 1848 suddenly resurrected in less easily 
rebuked rebellions. In Germany, "all the dis- 
appointments of thirty years, the smoldering im- 
patience and sense of outrage, the powerful aspira- 
tion for political freedom among the people, broke 
out in sudden flame. There was instantly an out- 
cry for freedom of speech an'd of the press, the right 
of suffrage, and a constitutional form of govern- 
ment in every state. On March 13 the people of 
Vienna arose, and after a bloody fight with the 
troops compelled Metternich to give up his office as 
minister, and seek safety in exile." (Sidney B. Fay) . 
The liberation of Schleswig-Holstein from the 
illiberal treatment of Denmark was frustrated at 
the time by the intervention of England and of 
Russia. In Austria the tribal animosities and the 
incompatible temperaments of races stultified and 
submerged the movement by disunion, while the 
unity of interests and the sway of armed support 
maintained the superiority of Class. But cer- 
tainly it did not mean peace. Kossuth in Hun- 
gary held out against the Austrian forces aided by 
the Rumanians, but the hand of the Czar Nicholas 
was extended in fraternal protection to Francis 
Joseph, and the unhappy patriots were utterly 



230 Europe's Handicap — 

crushed by the Slavic invasion, while the victors, 
with the remorselessness of the savage, and the 
embittered hatred of the class spirit, rioted in a 
carnage of sinful vengeance. War raged in Italy, 
in the Confederation, while the jealousies of 
Prussia and of Austria prevented a German union 
which may have had incalculable results. No 
Holy Alliance could have quelled the storm, except 
by just such means as now forced back the stream 
of democratic tendencies, through the omnipotent 
pressure of shot and shell. 

France acquired a notorious fraud — Napoleon 
III — for President of its hastily concocted Re- 
public, whose stealthy hand later robbed her of her 
very fragile possession, plunged her into new wars, 
and led her to the destructive experiment of 1870 — 
Sedan and Gravelotte. The Crimean War shook 
apart the increasingly weakening chain of sympa- 
thy between the German Powers, and the Musco- 
vite Czar, and though Schwarzenberg had said, 
"Austria will astonish the world by her ingrati- 
tude," the Court of Vienna was willing to accept 
the reproach without misgivings, while almost im- 
mediately after the disaster of Konigraths the 
Germanic league of identical interests tightened 
the natural alliance of Germany and of Austria. 
Bismarck had said indeed when he opposed the 
cession of territory by Austria to Germany, "we 
ought rather to reserve the possibility of becoming 
friends again, with our adversary of the moment, 
and in any case to regard the Austrian state as a 
piece on the European chessboard, and the renewal 



Tribe and Class 231 

of friendly relations with her as a move open 
to us." This utterance was made with keen 
prevision, after the campaign of 1866, and in 1876 
Treitschke wrote, "Germany is immediately con- 
cerned in the existence of Austria." Hungary had 
no reason to expect anything from Russia and it 
only required tact, condescension, and a show of 
solicitude for her welfare to bring the Magyars 
into a tolerant attitude of reconciliation with 
Austria. Treitschke has insisted that "no Euro- 
pean state, Germany least of all, can tolerate a 
permanent Russian settlement in Stamboul, if 
only because of the feverish excitement which 
would be bound to flame through all the Slav races 
at such a movement." Turkey, its maintenance 
or its obliteration forms the touch stone of the 
solution of the riddle of the present war. Thus the 
formative elements of The Holy Alliance fell apart 
into two spheres of feeling, and their separation 
became more profound after the war of 1878, be- 
tween Russia and Turkey, forcing an implied 
offensive and defensive alliance between Germany 
and Austria, and so, by reason of Germany's 
phenomenal economic growth bringing about a 
rearrangement of the political molecules, with the 
unexpected issue of an identical point of view (?) 
between the autocracy of Russia, and the more 
emancipated communities of France and of Eng- 
land, an alliance long ago favored by the circum- 
stance of France becoming the banker of Russia, 
and considered still longer ago, as Lamartine put 
it, as le cri de la nature.'' 



232 Europe's Handicap — 

A glance at the provisions of the Treaty of Ber- 
lin confirms incontestably the impression that 
Russia and Austria could no longer be grouped 
together, and the divergence started then has 
to-day culminated in a violent rupture. The 
Treaty of Berlin administered a freshened vitality 
to the ineradicable tribal aims of the Balkan 
provinces, and, under the fomenting exasperations 
of later events, encouraged the Balkan war of 1913 
from which again has flowed through vicissitudes 
of tribal and class designs, more or less understood, 
the present war. 

By the Treaty of Berlin complete independence 
was given to Roumania, Servia, and Montenegro; 
a state of Bulgaria was created north of the 
Balkans, and south of the Balkans a smaller 
Bulgaria under the name of Eastern Roumelia; 
Bosnia and Herzegovina were to be ruled by 
Austria; Russia received back Bessarabia, lost in 
the Crimean war, and in Asia was allowed Ardahan, 
Kars and Batoum with its great port on the Black 
Sea. How that treaty was regarded by the dis- 
putants, and the diplomatic mind of Europe, can 
be best portrayed by McCarthy's moderative 
resume; 

"The Treaty of Berlin gave rise to keen and 
adverse criticism. Much complaint was 
made of the curious arrangement which 
divided the Bulgarian populations into two 
separate States, under wholly different sys- 
tems of government. This, it was said, is 
only the example of the Congress of Paris 



Tribe and Class 233 

over again. It is just such another futile 
attempt as that which was made to keep 
the Danubian principalities separate from 
each other, in the hope of thereby diminish- 
ing the influence of Russia, and securing 
greater influence for Turkey. The simple 
and natural arrangement, it was urged, 
would have been to unite the whole of 
these populations at once under one form 
of government. To that, it was insisted, 
they must come in the end, and the inter- 
val of separation is only more likely to be 
successfully employed by Russia in spreading 
her influence, because each division of the 
population is so small as to be unable to offer 
any effective resistance to her advances. On 
the other hand, it was argued by the sup- 
porters of the Treaty that the Bulgarian 
question was not so simple and straightfor- 
ward as might have been supposed; that 
there was a considerable variety of races, of 
religions, and of interests enclosed in what 
some people chose to call Bulgaria, and that 
no better arrangement could be found than to 
keep one portion still under the protection of 
the Porte, while allowing to the other some- 
thing that might almost be styled independ- 
ence. The arrangement which gave Bosnia 
and Herzegovina to the occupation of Austria 
became afterwards the subject of sharp con- 
troversy. The Prime-minister himself at a 
later day actually declared that this step was 



234 Europe's Handicap — 

taken in order to put another Power, not 
Russia, on the high road to Constantinople if 
the succession to the Porte should ever be- 
come vacant. On the other hand Austrian 
statesmen themselves, denied that any such 
intention was in the mind of the Emperor of 
Austria. They insisted that the occupation 
was accepted by Austria, out of no feeling of 
individual advantage, but on the contrary, 
at much inconvenience and some sacrifice, and 
solely in the interest of the common peace of 
Europe. Very bitter indeed, was the con- 
troversy provoked by the surrender to Russia 
of the Bessarabian territory, taken from her 
at the time of the Crimean War. Roumania, 
the gallant and spirited little State which had 
thriven surprisingly under her new system of 
government, was thus plundered in order to 
satisfy Russia's self-love. Russia had set her 
heart upon recovering every single one of the 
advantages, real or only nominal, which she 
had been compelled to sacrifice at the close of 
the Crimean War. This was the last rem- 
nant of the victory obtained over her at so 
much cost and after such a struggle by the 
combined Powers of the West. Now she had 
again regained everything. The Black Sea 
was open to her war-vessels, and its shores to 
her arsenals. The last slight trace of Crim.ean 
humiliation was effaced in the restoration of 
the territory of Bessarabia. Profound dis- 
appointment was caused among many Euro- 



Tribe and Class 235 

pean populations, as well as among the Greeks 
themselves, by the arrangements for the 
rectification of the Greek frontier. The im- 
pression left in the minds of the Greek 
delegates was, that the influence of the Eng- 
lish Ministers had in every instance been 
given in favor of Turkey and against the 
claims of Greece. Thus, speaking roughly, 
it may be said that the effect of the Congress 
of Berlin on the mind of Europe was to make 
the Christian populations of the south-east 
believe that their friend was Russia and their 
enemies were England and Turkey; to make 
the Greeks believe th'at France was their es- 
pecial friend, and that England was their 
enemy; and to create an uncomfortable 
impression everywhere that the whole Con- 
gress was a prearranged business, a transac- 
tion with a foregone conclusion, a dramatic 
performance carefully rehearsed before in all 
its details, and merely enacted as a pageant 
on the Berlin stage." 
And the event turned out that it was exactly 
that, another triumphant example of the per- 
nicious activity and the deeply seated intrusive 
ubiquity of Class, while the whole quarrelsome 
attitude of the many competitors for place and 
spoils emphasized anew the prevalent appetencies 
of tribe. The irremediable dilemma of Europe is 
newly and differently protruded at every settle- 
ment of her disorders. Unforgetable memories 
surge upward in the heart of the conquerors, and 



236 Europe's Handicap — 

the treasure of hate for dispossession rankles in 
the heart of the conquered. Read Treitschke's 
most eloquent essay ''What We Demand from 
France'' to realize how in the soul of this entranced 
German, the reclamation of Alsace and Lorraine 
to the fatherland was the religious duty of the 
victorious Germans, after the war of 1870. 

"In view of our obligation to secure the peace 
of the world, who will venture to object that the 
people of Alsace and Lorraine do not want to 
belong to us? The doctrine of the right of all the 
branches of the German race to decide on their 
own destinies, the plausible solution of demagogues 
without a fatherland, shiver to pieces in presence 
of the sacred necessity of these great days. These 
territories are ours by the right of the sword, and 
we shall dispose of them in virtue of a higher right 
— the right of the German nation which will not 
permit its lost children to remain strangers to the 
German Empire. We Germans, who know Ger- 
many and France, know better than these unfor- 
tunates themselves, what is good for the people 
of Alsace, who have remained under the misleading 
influence of their French connection, outside the 
sympathies of new Germany. Against their wills 
we shall restore them to their true selves." Here 
is the proud note of Class and the shrill scream of 
Tribe also. 

But the German tribes were nationalized, and 
the variegated and petty despotisms of the in- 
numerable lesser lords swept away before the 
coercive absorption of a new Germany, when 



Tribe and Class 237 

"there grew and grew in the nation the conscious- 
ness of an immeasurable strength, a living inde- 
structible union of both intellectual and political 
life" (Treitschke). Before this stupendous spec- 
tacle the slow incubation of the designs of the 
Muscovite and the dreams of the Balkans mo- 
mentarily halted. The treaty of Berlin had ex- 
actly pleased no one, and the Russian bear gnawed 
his paws with discontent over an insufficient 
return for his venture. But apparently the days 
of the Moslem in Europe were numbered, and the 
next move depended upon circumstance, upon 
opportunity, and upon the proper accroiipissement 
of the Balkan dogs of war, until they might be 
favorably released from the leash. 

Meanwhile Russia, momentarily blocked to- 
wards the South, in her restless motion towards 
the sea, like a dammed river, had essayed new 
mouths of egress in Asia. Here again her Man- 
churian enterprise met the irreconcilable rivalry of 
Japan, and "the little yellow man" drove her off. 
Awaiting her necessary recuperation, she doubtless 
permitted herself to dream, as ever, of the crescents 
of Istambul replaced by the cross on St. Sophia, 
and with stolid and imperturbable patience 
watched the slow infiltration of reform-politics 
into the flaccid veins of old Turkey, for, as 
Treitschke has written, she believed that "the 
worst days arose for the Osman Empire when 
attempts at reform were started." And while she 
waited she was not unconscious of her duty to- 
wards those instrumentalities, whose hour of 



238 Europe's Handicap — 

action the hands of the clock might at any moment 
strike, viz. the Balkan states and Greece, where 
the frenzy of pan-slavism was unquenched, and the 
unwillingly confessed insults to their religion 
remembered. Passing quickly to an inevitable 
denouement we encounter the war of the Balkan 
States with Turkey in 1913. 

The Balkan States present the tribal condition 
of Europe in its cruder and more aboriginal form. 
Standardized into nations and enlarged and 
elaborated by the application of astute diplomacy 
in connection with great civilizations the Tribe 
does not present its more usual technical wildness, 
however truly the tribal traits are retained. But 
to the Balkan states in their narrower environ- 
ment, and in a comparatively inchoate develop- 
ment, with less politely restrained evidence of 
greed, the word has a less repugnant appositeness. 
At the very moment, Bulgaria is bargaining for her 
price, from either party in the struggle. She 
wants a part of Macedonia, witheld from her by 
Servia, and it has rankled in her breast that Russia 
has refused to expel the Servians from this coveted 
possession. Roumania is clamoring for Transyl- 
vania in Hungary, although we are told that ''in 
annexing Transylvania to Roumania the province 
would prove as prickly a thorn as Venice showed 
itself to be in the hands of the Austrians". And 
it also appears that, as a matter of fact, the Rou- 
manian population in Transylvania "is a minority 
among the other nationalities". And Servia her- 
self is casting too envious glances at Bosnia. 



Tribe and Class 239 

The Balkan war of 1912-13 has a vital bearing 
upon all the questions introduced in the present 
conflict, though at the moment the interest of a 
political diagnosis subsides before the unexpected 
spectacle of finding the war converted into a 
death struggle. 

The situation in the Balkans is the consequence 
of a historic disaster, and of an ethnic confusion 
of tribes. The conquest of Turkey in Europe by 
the Osmanli in the fourteenth century inaugurated 
a religious warfare, the enmity of a deadly and an 
irreconcilable persistent religious feud; while 
previously the residues of various late migrations, 
finding no aperture of escape westward, settled 
down in the peninsular, and consigned its moun- 
tainous regions to incessant turmoil. To-day, 
and for a century or more past, as the result of 
very deplorable relations between the Moslems 
and the Christians, there have been a series of out- 
breaks and clashes, while national wars have con- 
tributed to slowly detach bit by bit from the 
former vast territory of the Turks important frag- 
ments, which again, by a mixture of chance and of 
judgment, have formed the independent sovereign- 
ties called the Balkan States. Now two over- 
riding impressions are created from any, even cur- 
sory, review of the confusion of tongues, matched 
by a not less bewildering labyrinth of events, which 
distinguish this almost "savage Europe" as it has 
been called. And over these two impressions 
broods the terror of a reminiscent loathing of 



240 Europe's Handicap — 

barbarity, and an almost simultaneous enthusiasm 
for heroism and fidelity. 

The impressions are first; that any permanent 
union, or even juxtaposition, of the christian 
communities of Bulgaria, Roumania, Servia, 
Montenegro, Bosnia, Macedonia with the followers 
of the True Prophet is a hopeless expectation, not 
alone from the utter immiscibility, so to speak, of 
faith and temperament, but as a logical impasse, 
since, as Treitschke writes, "it is impossible that 
the God-inspired Bashi-bazouk, after having 
ripped open the Bulgarian mother and sold her 
children as slaves, should now of his own accord 
live with the survivors of his victims as a peaceful 
citizen on the footing of equal rights. It would 
be more impossible for the Bulgarian to submit for 
a moment to the Bashi-bazouk's dictation." As a 
matter of fact Bulgaria is now independent, and its 
Islamic population is deserting it. 

The second impression is that the elements of 
concordance, the unifying influence that might 
consolidate these tribal states into a confedera- 
tion, is religion and race. The majority of the 
christians belong to the Greek communion (the 
Greeks qua Greeks have made both Bulgarians 
and Servians very uncomfortable under the ecclesi- 
astical oppression of the Orthodox Greek church), 
and the prevalent ethnic strain is Slavic, and the 
formation of the States, with an independent 
Greece, permits a gradual separation of warring 
ethnic ingredients into more homogeneous com- 
partments, as the Greeks may concentrate in 



Tribe and Class 241 

Greece, the Slavs in Bulgaria, Servia and Rou- 
mania, and inasmuch as McCarthy has said 
"these different sects and races agree in hardly 
anything but in their common detestation of 
Ottoman rule", once relieved of their mutual repul- 
sion, their common hatred for Turkey gains an 
operative ascendency. 

Now Pan-Slavism is a very real political factor, 
and the Greek Church is a formidable fact, and 
both Pan-Slavism and the Greek Church obtain 
in Russia an unquestioning allegiance for the 
latter, and an enthusiastic endorsement for the 
former. Thus Russia, by the natural heritage of 
events and principles, became the protagonist of 
Slavic ideals, the ultimate servitor and champion 
of Slavic emancipation. With the moderating 
and liberalizing tendencies of recent years, the 
Slavophile bigotry and iconoclasm of the middle 
of the last century has been sensibly permeated — 
in its present humour — by political and economic 
motives, and the growing self-assertiveness of the 
Balkan states, has more dangerously threatened 
the proposed hegemony of Russia in any Slavic 
union. But yet never was the realization of Slavic 
ambitions so near accomplishment as at present. 
Disturbing experiences have interfered somewhat 
with the previous moral suzerainty of Russia in 
Bulgaria, at least, and partially upset calculations 
of a general Balkan understanding. The treaty of 
San Stefano, negotiated only six miles from 
Constantinople, had extorted the most splendid 
concessions from Turkey, and Russia, as the conse- 



242 Europe's Handicap — 

quence of her crushing victories, arose imperiously 
before the eyes of Europe — as usually, trihally 
concerned over any preposterous eminence any- 
where — as the arbiter of the Eastern question, 
insuring a solution flagrantly at defiance of the 
interests of the soi-disant protectors of the Mussul- 
man's reign in Europe, viz. England, and Austria. 
The tribal nations fluttered in concert, and their 
officious interference, with the sympathetic neu- 
trality of Germany, brought about the violent dis- 
memberment of the San Stefano treaty, and the 
substitution for it of the Berlin treaty. By this 
rescript Bulgaria lost Macedonia, lost the 
provinces erected in the state of Roumelia, while 
Bosnia and Herzegovina were absorbed by Austria, 
Servia and Montenegro got less than they wanted, 
and expected, the important lands of Bessarabia 
were returned to Russia, and England accepted 
Cyprus, as a neighboring station for her soldiers, 
in proximity to the then perplexed and diffident 
Turk. Nobody was quite satisfied, and the range 
of dissatisfaction attained depths of ominous dis- 
content. 

It was all typically tribal, whatever size and 
dignity was incorporated in the signatories to the 
baffling make-shift, and yet it really could be 
nothing more, under those artificial conditions 
which Europe and her history has created. Con- 
ditions which continually foment jealousies, envies, 
the rapacity of foolish ambitions, the dreams of 
state-makers, the rhapsodies of race lyricists, the 
ingenuity of diplomatic deals, the graft of terri- 



Tribe and Class 243 

torial extension, the cupidity of trade, hopeless 
disunion at the heart of things, an enamelled 
smoothness on the surface, and all, all, the in- 
tellectualized analogues of the greeds, cruelties, 
aggressions, deceits, of the Celt, the Goth, the 
Hun, the Magyar, the Roman, the Greek, in those 
ethnic bases of modern Europe we have hastily 
epitomized. 

After the treaty of Berlin, Russian troops filled 
Bulgaria, and a Russian commission organized the 
state. The "arbitrary conduct and domineering 
attitude of the Russian officials soon cooled the 
fervor of the Bulgarians for their deliverers", 
which was later followed by an open rupture. In 
the meanwhile Bulgaria had quietly annexed 
Roumelia, and Instantly a new shock and a new 
consternation beset the tribal plotters. But the 
new face of affairs exactly turned the tables of their 
tactics. England supported Bulgaria, and Russia 
denounced her. Turkey raged, but was getting 
ready to meet an aroused and militant Greece, 
while Servia, the Inevitable rival of Bulgaria, 
with — observe — the approval and secret agree- 
ment of assistance of Austria, turned against her 
own kith and kin. At Sllvlnltza Bulgaria under 
Prince Alexander bloodily defeated the Servians, 
who were pursued into their own kingdom, and 
only saved by the Intervention of the Empire's 
arms. Later Bulgaria and Russia patched up 
their disagreements, under the subservient ad- 
ministration of Prince Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg, 
and a rapprochement was effected — and wisely — 



244 Europe's Handicap — 

between Bulgaria and Servia, while the Balkan 
Union widened its outlook, and perfected its 
designs, all of which were inimical to the territorial 
integrity of Turkey, Austria-Hungary, and of 
Russia. When the Macedonian question came 
up, there was a consolidated rush to arms for the 
spoliation of Turkey, and, after the victory, 
recriminations and a subsequent fight between 
themselves, and later amply conceived plans for 
further enlargements, at the expense of Russia 
and Austria, which by reason of the present war 
have now settled down into confident bids this 
way and that, according to the size of the bribe 
offered by the contestants. 

The unsettlement we have indicated of the 
Russian influence in the Balkans was succeeded by 
two unexpected tendencies, the gradual removal 
of the English protectorate over Turkey, and its 
rapid assumption by Germany, with the ap- 
parently sympathetic connivance of Austria. 
German officers remodelled the Turkish army, and 
strengthened her fortifications, while German 
capitalists acquired the railroads of Asia-Minor, 
and established large industrial interests. Eng- 
land, subjected to unsparing criticism for her im- 
modest shielding of the Turkish murderers in 1875, 
under Gladstone averted her eyes more and more 
from the inquiring and uneasy glances of the Mos- 
lem ruler. Her practical ownership of Egypt and 
the Suez canal, reassured her of the control of her 
Eastern communications, while it also stirred the 
Turkish government with a recalcitrant vexation. 



Tribe and Class 245 

Russia regained her foot-hold in the Balkans, in 
a measure, but encountered also the undermining 
processes of German diplomacy. Still it would, 
or ought to be impossible for the Balkans to forget 
old and unrequited debts of gratitude to Russia, 
except that, in tribal temperaments, nothing is 
remembered except reprisals. The Balkan war of 
1912-13 at once precipitated a crisis, which recon- 
stituted anew the Eastern Problem, and in its later 
savage fratricidal altercations led to embitter- 
ments which disrupted the Balkan friendships, 
and complicated diplomacy, as the emissaries of 
Russia, Austria, and Germany, hurried to their 
posts to turn the event to their advantage. There 
also at once appeared a unity of interests between 
the Germans and the Dual Empire, much as the 
german leaders deplored, and chafed under, the 
infliction of Austrian arrogance and heartlessness 
in the Balkan communities of the lately acquired 
Bosnia and Herzegovina, which acts murderously 
culminated in the assassination of the Arch-duke 
Franz Ferdinand of Austria, and his wife, the 
Duchess of Hohenburg at Serajevo when the 
"percussion cap" (Servia), of the "powder-box" 
the Balkan Peninsula), went off and exploded the 
tribal magazines of Europe. Treitschke in 1876, 
with his political sagacity, explained Germany's 
position, "we want lasting endurable conditions in 
the Peninsula, which may pacify that part of the 
world, and so we want no more foreign domina- 
tion, certainly no annexations, either Austrian or 
Russian. All good Germans are united in this 



246 Europe's Handicap — 

resolution, because what may in any way endanger 
Austria's existence is a blow at our own empire.'' 

In the Balkan War the combatants fought it out 
first as between the States and Turkey, and then, 
by a most indefensible blunder, fought it out 
between themselves, while the Powers, agitated 
with suspicion, fearful of a general conflagration, 
and impotent to forecast the consequences of inter- 
vention, watched and waited. The Balkan War 
which laid the seeds of Discord that have cropped 
out into the present monstrous garden of confu- 
sion, may be well and briefly summarized in the 
words of President Schurman; ''what was the 
occasion of the war between Turkey and the 
Balkan states in 1912? The most general answer 
that can be given to that question, is contained in 
the one word Macedonia. Hostile activities in 
Macedonia naturally produced reprisals at the 
hands of Turkish authorities. In one district 
alone 100 villages were burned, over 8,000 houses 
destroyed, and 60,000 peasants left without 
homes at the beginning of winter. Meanwhile the 
Austrian and Russian governments intervened, 
and drew up elaborate schemes of reform, but their 
plans could not be adequately enforced, and the 
result was failure. The Austro-Russian entente 
came to an end in 1908, and in the same year 
England joined Russia in a project aiming at a 
better administration of justice, and involving 
more effective European supervision. Scarcely 
had this programme been announced, when the 
revolution, under the Young Turk party, broke 



Tribe and Class 247 

out, which promised to the world a regeneration of 
the Ottoman Empire. Hopeful of these constitu- 
tional reformers of Turkey, Europe withdrew from 
Macedonia, and entrusted its destinies to its new 
master. Never was there a more bitter disap- 
pointment. If autocratic Sultans had punished 
the poor Macedonians with whips, the Young 
Turks flayed them with scorpions. Sympathy, 
indignation, and horror, conspired with na- 
tionalistic aspirations and territorial interests, to 
arouse the kindred populations of the surrounding 
states. And in October 1912 war was declared 
against Turkey by Bulgaria, Servia, Montenegro, 
and Greece." 

Turkey was badly whipped, and, but for the 
intervention of the Powers, would have been 
driven pele-mele over the Sea of Marmora into 
Asia. But the spoils remained to be divided, 
and around them the tribal propensities bristled 
up with vivid expectations. Servia was in a 
truculent and disappointed humour; she had been 
denied the issue to the Adriatic sea, which she had 
fairly won. Austria put her foot down there, and 
prodded the other Powers to support her, illustrat- 
ing anew her Class character of an insufferable 
selfishness, her unenviable felicity of remaining 
the most detested of sovereignties. Well! Servia's 
disgust was rather stiffly deepened, when she dis- 
covered that Bulgaria intended to reserve the 
lion's share of the conquered Macedonia, that she 
should withdraw from central Macedonia, while 
the Montenegrins must be content with such fortu- 



248 Europe's Handicap — 

itous scraps as Bulgaria chose to let drop from her 
overflowing banquet, appetizing but insufficient. 

Russia, watching for an opening stepped in at 
this moment, to offer her disinterested (?) and 
helpful service, in straightening out the tangle, 
while Austria got hot in the neck at the Russian 
intrusion. It availed nothing, and at it again, 
hammer and tongs, Bulgaria and Servia pitched 
into each other, while the adjoining kennels of 
Greece, Turkey, and Roumania, also let loose their 
howling contents upon the very imprudent and 
unfortunate Bulgaria. Bulgaria was hauled to 
the ground, and might have been atrociously 
mauled, if she had not surrendered. The Treaty 
of Bucharest brought forward a new aspirant to 
leadership, and especially a new claimant for 
concessions viz., Roumania. This interesting state 
with, under the circumstance, a rather unanswer- 
able argument, asked for the northeastern corner 
of Bulgaria, from Turtukai on the Danube to 
Baltchik on the Black Sea. She got it. This 
aspiring province seems to have an itching palm. 
The present price of her neutrality, or of her active 
participation on either side of the conflict, is more 
land, for her spokesman. Professor N. Basilesco 
of the University of Bucharest, asks for her, "that 
Russia restore to Roumania all Bessarabia up to 
the Dniester, as she received it from Turkey 
in 1812. 

**That all the Roumanian countries situated be- 
tween the Theiss and the Danube be incorporated 
with Roumania. 



Tribe and Class 249 

"That the old Dacia of Trajan's time be restored 
within its original boundaries". In the troubled 
waters the Balkan states are fishing not only with 
long rods, but with invincible precision. 

The Balkan War was a surprise, and the 
patronizing or fulminating airs of the Powers 
underwent a salutary subsidence before a fresh 
and potential contribution to Europe's tribal dis- 
orders, and at a point too, where the racial cauldron 
was plentifully supplied with irritable and pun- 
gent ingredients. Servia like a Falconbridge, 
among the valiant tribes seemed to cry out; 

Let not the world see- fear, and sad dis- 
trust, 
Govern the motion of a kingly eye; 
Be stirring as the time; be fire with fire: 
Threaten the threatener, and outface the 

brow 
Of bragging horror ; so shall inferior eyes, 
That borrow their behaviour from the 

great, 
Grow great by your example, and put on 
The dauntless spirit of resolution. 

Conscious of her powers, but smarting under the 
distraint of a bullying power, Servia became a hot 
bed of retaliatory spirits. She was further 
inflamed by the misbehaviour of Austria in Bosnia 
and Herzegovina, which was bone of her bone, and 
flesh of her flesh, To quote the words of Charles 
Willis Thompson; "indeed the Austrian hand had 
lain heavily upon Bosnia. The initial outrage of 



250 Europe's Handicap — 

annexation, in violation of Austria's word pledged 
at the Congress of Berlin, might have been 
palliated by a considerate treatment of the popula- 
tions of the stolen states; but that has never been 
Austria's way. Her way with Bosnia and Herze- 
govina after 1908 was her way with Northern 
Italy in the nineteenth century, and it has ended 
in the same fashion. In Italy the aggrandizement 
of Sardinia gave the oppressed Italian States a 
defender; the aggrandizement of Servia by the 
Balkan Wars of 1912-13 gave a defender to her 
oppressed kinsfolk in Bosnia and Herzegovina. 
In both cases Austria's blind and brutal treat- 
ment had so angered the subject populations, as to 
throw them into the arms of their aggrandized 
friends". 

The Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the 
Austrian throne, seems to have belonged to the 
most scriptural of Class bigots, an idolater of the 
abstract sublimity of his title, and so dazed by its 
immensity as to possibly resent the actual exist- 
ence of the ordinary civilian, as an unnecessary 
impertinence. Such creatures are incomprehen- 
sible, but they have been known. This man 
seemed to have been one of them. Dickens knew; 
do we not recall, that, "the earth was made for 
Dombey and Son to trade in, and the sun and 
moon were made to give them light. Rivers and 
seas were formed to float their ships; rainbows 
gave them promise of fair weather; winds blew 
for or against their enterprises; stars and planets 
circled in their orbits to preserve inviolate a 



Tribe and Class 251 

system of which they were the centre. Common 
abbreviations took new meanings in Dombey's 
eyes, and had sole reference to them: A. D. had 
no concern with Anno Domini, but stood for anno 
Dombei — and Son." 

This man Franz Ferdinand was shot to death 
in the streets of Serajevo on the morning of 
Sunday, June 28th, 1914, by a young man, 
Gavrio Prinzip, and that shot has since been heard 
around the world. To Austria it was the defiance 
of a people, that she had reason to fear, but behind 
it ranged, in the quickly operating and vindictive 
mind of Class and tribal men, the unfathomable 
depths of plot upon plot, with the stalwart figure 
of the Czar of Russia spectrally above them as an 
inspiration and as a protector. For different 
major reasons and for identical minor ones Ger- 
many and Austria were driven into a closer com- 
pact of understanding and mutual support. Their 
union was a moral and a political necessity, for it 
never can be too deeply impressed upon the 
ingenuous thought of Americans — alone in the 
whole world wearing their heart upon their sleeve 
— that the brooding minds of European chancel- 
leries live on intrigue, and dwell perpetually in the 
regions of DISTRUST. Besides was it not more 
coarsely apparent that the political entities of 
Europe — and behind them the guns of their arma- 
ments — had been centralizing for years, like a 
concretionary action in minerals and ores, around 
pivotal points of national policies or ambitions? 
Remember too that the German element is omni- 



252 Europe's Handicap — 

present in Austrian affairs, and then recall the 
deeply significant words of Treitschke — their 
most acute politician — "hatred of the Slavs, on 
the other hand is deep in our blood, and it is also 
heartily reciprocated on the other side. For 
centuries we have dealt with the nations of the 
East only as enemies, as rulers, or as teachers: 
even to-day we still exhibit to them all the harsh 

and domineering traits of our character 

To tell the truth the Slav seems to us a born Slave." 
But how easily realized also, by any one, was 
the rage and incensed grief of an arrogant and 
superlative court at t?his vulgar death of the man 
who was the incarnation of royalty, so near the 
actual ascent to the throne that it might seem 
only a few breaths separated him from the splendid 
eminence. They made exorbitant demands upon 
the astounded Province, and they intended doubt- 
less to make them almost unbearable. Austria 
with her customary malignancy, the indurated 
hardness of her official temper, felt it was a crisis, 
and behind her theories of the approaching Euro- 
pean conflict was the unappeasible hatred she felt 
for this obstreperous little Servia, which had been 
a thorn in her side and refused suppression, and 
to the genius of Class the obstinacy of opposition 
rouses the last heats of hatred. Servia was 
willing to make the most considerate concessions 
but she would not permit Austria to ride rough- 
shod over her independence. We can scarcely 
doubt that Austria knew, that whatever the 
event, Germany would stand firmly at her back, 



Tribe and Class 253 

and it does seem that Austria's demands on Servia 
were intentionally made scandalously insulting, 
simply to court their rejection — and then — the 
CRASH. 

Well the Crash came. How ready and mo- 
mentarily expectant and feverishly watchful were 
the empires of Europe, was instantly seen, when 
on all sides the men rushed to arms. The armed 
camp was filled with orders, and the rattling guns, 
the groaning caissons, the apparelled hosts, the 
convoked and anxious bankers, even, showed too 
clearly that Europe's long apprehensions were 
over. THE WAR WAS HERE. 

And because the WAR was on, every hidden or 
suppressed or half thought-out project, in the 
many minded chancelleries of Europe, also sprang 
into life, and the interests of TRIBE and of CLASS 
simultaneously awoke. For England it was, as 
Ernst Haeckel declares, the Isolation of Germany, 
"entirely because of competitive hatred and envy 
of the well-being and blossoming civilization of 
the United German Empire" ; for France it was the 
long hoped-for, prayed-for, sung-for winning back 
of Alsace and Lorraine; for Russia the final 
descent of her lecherous hand upon Constantinople ; 
for the Balkans almost anything that might turn 
up; for Italy the possible retrievement of lost 
lands and the appeasement of her unsmouldering 
vendetta against Austria; for Belgium a sudden 
terror, and unquiet thoughts as to the value of 
England's guarantee of the safety of her borders; 
and— for GERMANY? 



254 Europe's Handicap — 

It is not easy, In the present frame of mind 
among Americans, to force upon unwilling listeners 
any comprehension of the exact conformation of 
the German thought at the extreme juncture that 
had arisen, a conformation that of course had its 
genetics — as the biogenists would say — in a long 
prior preparation of feeling and instruction. Not 
to enter into a long rehearsal of quotations two 
extracts from two observers, with diametrically 
opposed sympathies, will suffice. Jame Bryce, the 
englishman, says "to modern German writers the 
State is a much more tremendous entity than it is to 
Englishmen or Americans. It is a supreme power 
with a sort of mystic sanctity, a power conceived 
of, as it were, self-created, a force altogether dis- 
tinct from, and superior to the persons who com- 
pose it"; General von Bernhardi says, "we not 
only require for the full material development of 
our nation, on a scale corresponding to its intel- 
lectual importance, an extended political basis, 
but, we are compelled to obtain space for our in- 
creasing population, and markets for our 
industries. At every step which we take in this 
direction England will resolutely oppose us. Eng- 
lish policy may not have made the definite de- 
cision to attack us; but it doubtless wishes by all 
and every means, even the most extreme, to hinder 
every further expansion of German international 
influence and of German maritime power." Both 
Bryce's conception and von Bernhardi's vaticina- 
tions had been sounded in German ears by a group 



Tribe and Class 255 

of distinguished men, all of whom were earnest and 
patriotic, albeit swayed by the inexpugnable 
tribal lust of dominion, and the historic infatuation 
that associates greatness with Class prestige. The 
names are now familiar, von Bernhardi, von Beth- 
man, Hollweg, von Bulow, von der Goltz, von 
Clausewitz, Treitschke, Hans Delbruck, Frobenius. 
Obsessed with the notion of her own pre-eminence 
and panting for expansion, Germany realized that 
the moment of a supreme effort had come. For 
not only was she very confident in her power, but a 
nervous dread of the omnipresent danger of 
enemies haunted her. The tribal instinct of 
preservation, the tribal dr'eam of size, goaded her 
into action, but the immediate impulse sprang 
from an actual terror which seized upon her, as it 
seizes upon a man conscious of concealed foes, 
when he sees them spring into action, as of an 
animal conscious of lurking snares when it hears 
them operate. A scream of derisive incredulity 
and anger will always to-day meet such a declara- 
tion, but the probabilities greatly favor the theory. 
Fear accounts for the suddenness of Germany's 
action, but it was a fear almost transfigured by an 
overweening confidence, into something not far 
from the exultation of anticipated and welcomed 
conquest. The imagination of Class, always 
overbearing and always boastful, felt the approach 
of that Hour of Destiny of which Colonel H. 
Frobenius has made so much, and it repeated 
again for the millionth time, with an amused 



256 Europe's Handicap — 

cynicism not very different from the gloating 
satisfaction of ''Getting there"; 

Si vis pacem, para helium. 

Was there not reason for fear? Was anything 
unknown to that encyclopaedic mind and thrusting 
hand which determined the readiness of Germany 
for the throes of her final liberation from all fear? 
Every cabinet in Europe had delivered its secrets 
to her, and the argus eyes of thousands of emis- 
saries had watched with deliberate malice the 
spinning of the web that was expected to strangle 
those very throes of liberation. It was Russia, the 
prolific Slav population, whose rate of increase is 
2.01 per cent as against 1.40 per cent in Germany, 
whose constrictions were beginning already to 
tighten around Austria on the east and south. In 
no case could Germany afford to part with the 
dual empire, which felt itself more acutely con- 
cerned in Germany's fate. It was a problematic 
Italy on the south, whose allegiance to a feebly 
expressed understanding might be as readily dis- 
solved, as Germany found it convenient — and all 
tribes and class find such acts convenient — to 
cancel other equally fragile understandings. It 
was England on the seas with her fingers on the 
lines of commerce, so that each twitch tremu- 
lously awoke the Antipodes, and would surely 
annihilate Germany's colonies and do anything 
else that would chain the young giant, dangerously 
drunk with the wine of self-consciousness. And 
there was la belle France, not to be overmuch 



Tribe and Class 257 

trusted, and equipped, as never before, with the 
finest implements of destruction. Everything was 
tribal about her, and she was tribal too as a unit 
in the infernal lattice work of interests. What 
was on every side but FEAR? Had not Nietzsche 
the presumable apostle of force, said "the present 
so-called armed peace that prevails at present in 
all countries is a sign of a bellicose disposition that 
trusts neither itself nor its neighbor: and partly 
from hate, partly from /ear refuses to lay down its 
arms". Why indeed would there not be fear, and 
if fear then the quickest kind of action. 

But other things went with the fear, enrolled 
with it, mingled with it, and coloring it with pro- 
jects purely hedonistic; the enlargement of oppor- 
tunity, the acquisition of seaboard, the multiplica- 
tion of chances all over the world, with new posses- 
sions, the insistence upon a kind of economic 
equivalency with everyone, an absolute impregna- 
bility, and above all some indubitable pledge that 
Germany was to REMAIN. Years had evolved 
a stupendous egoism. Prof. Maurice Millioud 
has written the best about this, and skillfully and 
adroitly — if a little over done — shown the con- 
vergence of threads of moral, economic, industrial, 
scientific, political, military, progress whose ulti- 
mate composition, making up the present German 
nation, has created in the german individual an 
ideologue of something that might be labelled 
Pan-Germanism. But M. Millioud does not 
reveal what we believe is the mental mechanics 
illustrated here. It was a reaction, by the law of 



258 Europe*s Handicap — 

tribal reaction, against the tyranny of other tribal 
hegemonies, as of the English in the earlier nine- 
teenth century, the French in the eighteenth, the 
Italian in the fifteenth, the matriculation of a tribe 
in the larger responsibilities of a nation. But the 
success of its formation, the zealotry of its propaga- 
tion, meant, in the tribal and class relations of 
Europe, but one thing — WAR. For let it be 
reiterated — the purpose of this whole book — that 
while the root principle of the tribal State viz. 
FORCE dominates in Germany, the same 
principle underlies all European order. It is less 
stalwart in England, and less competently man- 
aged, less daring in France and less olTensive, less 
intellectual in Russia, and less scrupulous, less 
controlled in Austria and meaner, less sane in Italy 
and more refined, and in the other states of Europe 
always distinguishable, but, because of their 
quiescence, subjected to a subsidence, that leaves 
it either sullen or impotent. 

And there was that other chronic condition of 
tribal relations DISTRUST. In centuries of 
diplomacy, where lying, under the mask of an 
elegant indirection, has been accounted dis- 
tinguished, and lying without any mask at all, by 
a shameless mendacity, has been always accounted 
unfortunate, where Class needs nourished hypoc- 
risy, and royal oaths furnished a new illustration 
of the moral indigence of kings, Distrust has 
in a way become the habitual decorum of chan- 
celleries. And perhaps every minute counted — 
who could tell? — Germany was not only pre- 



Tribe and Class 259 

pared within the available resources of her 
country, but the Briareus armed inspection she 
had made of every other country enabled her to 
reap the best results from rapid action. She was 
placed between two fires, and uncertainty was a 
more dangerous predicament than open hostilities. 
Perhaps she forced the fighting. What else could 
she do? Her criminality is of the criminality of 
Europe that engenders and always has engendered 
WAR. Certainly the theory hinted at does not 
cover the whole ground by any means, and when 
M. Hartwig said to the author of The Near East 
from Within, "a kind of exasperation of public 
opinion has systematically taken place in your 
country, with the result that she is quite persuaded 
that war will be declared upon her one of these 
days, and so needs ever to be ready", he may or 
may not have known of what the same book pre- 
tends now, with much plausibility, to reveal, that 
Germany was actuated, not exactly as an arriere 
pensee, but as a vital motive for movement, by 
broad plans of eastern aggrandizement. These 
were in all probability undefined, but they were 
vitally operative in the upper — the Class — con- 
sciousness of the empire, and the King had nodded 
an assent neither equivocal or misunderstood. 
Many evanescent ebullitions, appearing on the 
surface of affairs in Germany, have made the 
whole world cognizant that there was a war party 
and a more pacific — not to be too euphemistic — 
war party in Germany, and that the Kaiser led 
the latter, and that at such a critical instant as 



260 Europe's Handicap — 

arose, when the Balkan emergency culminated in 
the murder of Franz Ferdinand, his moderate 
purposes were tumultuously brushed aside before 
the inrushing tides of militarism, pride, ambition, 
and FEAR, whose reinforcement daily became 
more formidable, as the alarm, spreading to the 
lowest strata of the social edifice, suddenly merged 
all factions into one, with the frenetic cry upon 
their lips of Deutchland uber Alles. 

Of course no one heeds very seriously, the 
analysis, sarcasm, or the pretentiously circum- 
stanced appreciation by english writers — admir- 
able literary performances — of German culture, 
which admix, with various accentuation, the notes 
of ridicule, of rage, of contempt, and of defiance. 
The benignity of the english sense of superiority 
over the rest of the world, has been sadly ruffled 
by German impudence, and the disquieting ob- 
servation of German skill. Mr. Gilbert K. 
Chesterton has surely forgotten his learning, in the 
exultation of venting his spleen, when he with a 
vicious facility writes, "if they have promised to 
shoot the cross off a church spire, or empty the ink 
pot into somebody's beer, or bring home some- 
body's ears in their pocket, for the pleasure of 
their families, I think in these cases they would 
feel a sort of a shadow of what civilized men feel 
in the fulfillment of a promise, as distinct from the 
making of it." This is the very mania of bam- 
boozledom, and our desecrating epithet might 
equally apply to the same author's perverted 
characterization, with all of its particularizations. 



Tribe and Class 261 

of the Prussian as a "positive barbarian", as one 
''who begins all his culture by that act which is 
the destruction of all creative thought, and con- 
structive action. He breaks that mirror in the 
mind in which a man can see the face of his friend 
or foe", but when he points out their tribal 
characteristics, while he hits obliquely indeed at all 
of Europe, he has felicitously put his accusative 
finger upon a fact, a racial fact, hopelessly real. 
Listen to his incinerating sentences; the Prussian 
character is "an egomania that is honestly blind to 
the fact that the other party is an ego, and, above 
all, an actual itch for tyranny and interference, the 
devil which everywhere torments the idle and the 
proud." This most amusing and insinuatingly 
plausible satirist has written much beside, and 
very much of its corrective irony as applied to the 
tribal notes of the German, seems to us most 
adaptable to the tribal (provincial) limitations of 
the englishman. Mais passons. 

England's involution in the war was perhaps a 
little sudden, unexpected perhaps to all english- 
men, and perhaps also unexpected to the Germans, 
though, while that is a current impression, it does 
not altogether bear analysis. Germany probably 
felt some natural scorn for England's military 
power, but she had every reason to dread her 
naval strength, and she could not have failed to 
foresee which way at least would lie her sympathies. 
As to England's immediate participation there was 
no doubt a moment's hesitation on the part of the 
government and a good deal of less uncertain 



262 Europe's Handicap — 

apprehension among her people. But the most 
superficial consideration brought instantly to view 
the extreme danger of allowing Germany an un- 
disputed access to her designs; for there have 
been always two points in English policies, whose 
susceptibilities were so sensitive that even the 
approach of danger awoke an irritating pain. One 
was India, and the other her naval supremacy, the 
integrity of her merchant marine. German suc- 
cess, especially if it was overwhelming — and who 
could say it would not be — was something to be 
dreaded. The instant Germany over-rode Bel- 
gium, and Belgium enrolled herself among the 
enemies of the Teuton hardly the most inex- 
perienced diplomacy would have failed to predict 
the result; Belgium would be made the spoil of 
war, and the German seaboard, extended over 
Belgium's coast, would frame up against England 
a very remorseless combatant at her undefended 
doors. Is it conceivable either that the English 
Ministry were not acquainted with the eastern 
schemes of Germany? It was given more than an 
inkling already by the well published fact of Ger- 
man officers in the Turkish army, German capital 
in the Asiatic railroads, and the many illustrated 
effusions of German writers upon Asiatic possi- 
bilities. England did not engage in the war solely 
on account of her pledge to Belgium. Absolute 
disinterested self-annihilation cannot be asked of 
any nation. She could not tolerate the suffoca- 
tion of so vigorous and systematized a proximity. 
She entered the war. 



Tribe and Class 263 

Considering now the immensity of this war, and 
the world-subduing motives apparently repre- 
sented by it on the part of the Allies, and their 
teutonic assailants, the question of exactly who 
began it retires to a rather juvenile background. 
It was not begun. It was simply the prolongation 
of that indefinitely long political disorder which 
attends the organization of tribes, and the mainte- 
nance of Class. The Norddeutsche AUgemeine 
Zeitung asserts that Russia had started military 
operations July 25, and that the Russian mobiliza- 
tion was under way on July 30th. In the issue of 
the New York American of June 28th 1915, ap- 
peared the reported correspondence of Emperor 
Wilhelm, Czar Nicholas, King George, and the 
Government of France, which certainly gave an 
impression that Emperor Wilhelm had, in a 
limited way, striven to hold back the outbreak of 
hostilities. The letters are superlatively flat in 
their strained affectation of august brotherliness, 
and the tip-toe style of statement, which per- 
haps pertains to the infrequency of the con- 
descension of their majesties to write at all, a 
vulgarity rather pompously, we believe, avoided 
by kings. These letters may mean little, or they 
may mean nothing. But the reckless fashion of 
the moment to fasten all the blame of this war on 
Germany is deplorable, and unmistakably igno- 
rant. In a collection of powder magazines in 
such proximity that an unguarded spark, falling 
on one or the other, of them, at any moment, will 
disrupt their restraint, the particular priority of 



264 Europe's Handicap — 

explosion in this one or in that hardly extenuates 
the blame of their careless grouping, and their dan- 
gerous contents. But, in the case of Europe, there 
was nothing careless about it at all. It was all 
premeditated. It is the inexorable necessity im- 
posed upon a Tribal and Class organization, upon 
an unavoidable stress of national rivalry, and 
an enmity which involves a whole lot of things, as 
national whims, language, history, ideals, tastes, 
habits, trade. 

That France wished to regain Alsace and Lor- 
raine was an open secret for years, that she had 
rehabilitated and immensely improved her mili- 
tary preparations for war was also known, and 
that the rhythmical resources of revanche had been 
fully exploited was a literary fact. Russia, relying 
for centuries upon the mailed fist, or better the 
bludgeon and the cutlass, for her aggressions, 
gloried in her military resources, and her ultimate 
designs were gloomily guessed at by armed and 
apprehensive neighbors. Austria has never been 
allowed to forget that she has enemies, and per- 
haps the memories of her own frightful sins appall 
her with the anticipated furies of a future Nemesis. 
Her armies were maintained on a basis of Militar- 
ism, and now she clings instinctively to her 
helmeted neighbor, whose insuperable skill in 
fighting she has every reason to be thankful for 
this hour. England is not a military nation cer- 
tainly, and she has never courted in recent years 
the opportunities of continental expansion, for the 
wider horizon of ruling the ocean exactly suited 



Tribe and Class 265 

her insular ambitions, and was also a more lucra- 
tive investment. She unquestionably appeals 
most to our sympathy, unlovable as she may be — 
but then unlovableness is only a demerit in the 
blood — and the claims of language are undeniable. 
It ought not to have surprised her to find herself at 
last at grips with an enemy whose belligerency she 
understood, and whose possible exploits the Battle 
of Dorking, a literary exploit of some twenty years 
ago, brought vividly to her mind, and for whose 
discomfiture indeed she has been at some pains to 
build interminable battleships. 

On the whole the only philosophic, rational, and 
purely intelligible view of this great European 
War, is to regard it exactly as one discusses an 
earthquake, a volcanic eruption, a cyclone, a 
waterspout, a landslide. It is a periodic phenomenon 
precisely deducible from the local disturbances — 
granting that they are known — when they attain 
that dynamic pressure that will precipitate the 
cataclysm. The blame that the newspaper editors 
and their prolific correspondents, both lay and 
professional — all tinged with a conventional religi- 
osity that defies the historic sense, and which may 
be suspected of a latent hypocrisy — heap upon the 
Germans, is a capital illustration of that fallacy in 
logic, known as the "undistributed middle". For 
is it not quite evident that the Germans are the 
victims of their predicament — King and people 
alike — in a class and tribal aggregate, and that the 
incident of one country or another starting wars 
is, in Europe, a function of the situation, a mo- 



266 Europe's Handicap — 

mentary suddenness here or there, the whim of a 
people, a tribe, the irascibility of a ruler, a Class? 
Surely it is known to everyone that the French 
began the war of 1870 indefensibly, that the tribal 
spirit — doubtless whetted by bribes, or forced by 
intimidation — has pushed the Italians into this 
present conflict — and most unwisely; that Austria 
absolutely started the campaign that ended in her 
overthrow at Koniggratz, for the gratification of her 
claims to priority in the German states, when she 
favored the succession of the Prince of Augusten- 
burg to the recently seized Holstein, (seized by 
Prussian and Austrian troops), wrenched too from 
Denmark; that Napoleon III stirred up strife, as 
Kinglake has shown, for the momentary obscura- 
tion of his own villainy in 1858 ; that the Boer war 
while literally begun by the unhappy Boers, was 
an inevitable collision provoked by English con- 
cupiscence. 

And as regards this scornful denunciation of 
Germany's desire for expansion have not such de- 
signs been always most typical of continental 
Europe, England contenting herself less expen- 
sively with seizing the ends of the earth? The 
inbred, blood-indented habits have become in- 
eradicable, after centuries of subornation. They 
were and are vital tendencies in these denizens of 
Europe, and can no more be expelled, as they are, 
than the fox can lose his predatory instincts, the 
hawk its raptorial needs, the tiger its carnivorous 
appetite. Is it impossible for these cozy- 
cornered, silk-stockinged, and mellifluous pro- 



Tribe and Class 267 

fessors to appreciate the ingrained psychology that 
grows, matures, and becomes coercive in men who 
contemplate a past made up of conquests, who see 
around them the glitter of arms from year to year, 
who acknowledge the impetuosity of racial (tribal) 
feelings, professing it themselves, who formulate a 
religion in the worship of a standard, and who 
permit the exorbitant predominance of certain 
groups of people, who by a legally recognized 
promotion, turn social policies into national 
propaganda? 

And in the tribal nature of the Germans we find 
illustrated to-day, as in the tribal days of Genseric 
or Vercingetoric, the fascinated devotion to a 
CHIEF. To-day indeed the chief must appeal 
to the much more expanded demands of modern 
culture, and in his appeal satisfy certain intel- 
lectual, moral, and physical ideals that crave the 
satiety of their hunger for personal idolatry. 
Emperor William approaches that combination in 
an extraordinary measure. Dr. Rose has urged 
that the Germans, less accustomed to the rule of 
law than the Romanized countries; — "accordingly 
until a recent time the German State has been 
weak and the idea of law has not dominated life as 
it has among the Latin peoples" ; — but the slightest 
inspection of historic idols show that over all of 
Europe, Latin and Teutonic alike, the adulation 
and the blind fellowship and obedience of the tribe 
is equally manifested, when the chieftain touches 
the springs of racial imagination as the embodi- 
ment — the beau ideal — of its proud hopes. In this 



268 Europe's Handicap — 

admirable language Dr. Rose characterizes the 
living German Kaiser; ''in this power of calling 
forth devotion, as also in the riddle of his person- 
ality, he may challenge comparison with Napoleon 

I In both men we notice a union of 

imaginative faculties and practical gifts. They 
could dream dreams of a world-wide Empire, and 
also do much to prepare for their realization. 
.... The vastness of the resources at their 
command exercised a baneful influence upon minds 
which were equally despotic and unbending; while 
the neurotic strain in their natures led them to 
insist on immediate and unquestioning obedience 
both in trifling matters and in questions of high 
policy". 

Perhaps this imputation is sensibly perverted by 
the literary fashion of picturing historic parallels, 
in which the author, lured by the ingenuity of his 
verbal contrivance, thinks what he writes, because 
he writes it. The chieftain at any rate remains, 
and the old true words of Tacitus are again applic- 
able. 

That admirable sarcasm with which English 
wits, as Chesterton, Bennett, Wells, and others 
have attempted to sear the German, and must 
certainly, in some of their keener thrusts, have 
punctured a skin not altogether pachyderm, is of 
course negligible. It leaves the German worse off 
perhaps as an object of artistic interest. It does 
not expel him from the companionship of 
men. He may indeed claim as a compensation 
some distinction as an administrator, a fighter, 



Tribe and Class 269 

and a patriot. And right here we are brought 
face to face with the charges that are intended to 
drive him outside of the pale of human recognition. 
The Germans have broken treaties, have com- 
mitted atrocities, and have invented "frightful- 
ness." The Germans are a part of their environ- 
ment, which in all of the peoples of Europe is the 
environment of Class; they are a consequence of 
their descent, which in all of the peoples of Europe 
is tribal. Let us note for a moment other evi- 
dences among other tribes than the German, in 
Europe, this facility of breaking treaties, and this 
irreparable mischief of cruelty, of atrocity. 

As regards the violation of the Neutrality of 
Belgium and the breaking of a treaty, the whole 
question — no matter what serious moral delin- 
quency it involved — is, in the light of War, and war's 
necessity — a necessity far more imperious than 
the average necessity which "knows no law" — 
suddenly restrained within the harsh rebuke of 
''Salus populi, etc." The Germans knew exactly 
what was essential for their success, and time — 
Time the very pulse of War — was pressing. 
Colonel Frobenius, a year or so before, had already 
with military precision, foreseen the dilemma. 
He wrote, speaking of French preparations for 
defence; "they had to obviate the possibility of 
an invasion of German troops in violation of 
Belgium's neutrality, or penetrating by way of 
Switzerland, so that the resisting powers of their 
old fortresses on these frontiers had to be improved 
and strengthened. Thus France has kept up a 



270 Europe's Handicap — 

line of fortifications on the whole of her eastern 
frontier, some 620 miles long which should stay a 
surprise invasion of a hostile force. It will be 
quite impossible in any future war to pass these 
fortresses without paying them any attention, as 
in 1870". 

This was the situation when Germany, plunging 
headlong toward her object, as she had every right 
to do, once war was begun, under the terrifying 
menace of a double invasion, with the sinister 
complication ahead of her, that England would 
probably declare war against her, asked permission 
of Belgium to cross her territory to enter France. 

Of course it was refused. That was precisely 
the position of honor and fidelity for Belgium to 
take towards her national ally France, and by 
implication in support of previous understandings 
with England. Refused, Germany, also by the 
paramount claims of safety, ignored the refusal, 
and drove Belgium into war in defense of her 
violated land. She might have succumbed to the 
superior force and offered no resistance, and for 
justification presented a very fair petition for 
clemency before the court of History in the allot- 
ment of blame for the transaction. She chose the 
more heroic alternative. She resisted, and — 
accepting the arbitrament of War — she was de- 
feated. But time had been lost, and the discom- 
fited, partially disconcerted Germans, were almost 
ungovernably incensed. The moral question of 
this violation, the raucous tumult raised in Eng- 
land over the desecrating appellation of "a scrap 



Tribe and Class 271 

of paper" to the Treaty, by the unspeakable 
German, was thus characterized, in anticipation, 
let it be remembered, by Homer Lea, in his book, 
The Day of the Saxon. Lea there said that England 
would find it necessary to violate the same neu- 
trality, "that" — the protest and exclamatory 
denunciation of England against this same viola- 
tion — "is unjustified, as the British Empire can 
make no impression by the sanctification of 
neutrality. This only forms a means of with- 
drawing from responsibility and imposing it on 
those nations who give way to the self-deception 
that such declamations of neutrality are inviol- 
able. And in that respect no nation has more 
frequently violated neutral territory, nor has any 
nation more often excused itself from the duty of 

observing neutrality than the British 

Should the Anglo-Saxons occupy these frontiers 
that will only mean territorial but not a moral 
violation of the neutrality of these countries. 
.... Neutrality of countries under such condi- 
tions has never been and never will be a factor to 
be reckoned with in a war between the nations. 
That kind of neutrality is a modern illusion, and 
indicates eccentric aberration." Recall too the 
imbedded cynicism of German leaders for the 
sacredness of treaties, a cynicism nurtured in the 
propitious soil of European selfishness. And in 
the case of Belgium this cynicism was effectively 
deepened by the bequeathed impression, since the 
days of Bismarck, that Belgium "was the heart of 
coalitional conspiracies." Considered in the light 



272 Europe's Handicap — 

of the tribal manners of Europe the violation of the 
neutrality of Belgium and the breaking of a treaty 
become simply superfluous trivialities. On a 
philosophical basis Prof. Hugo Muensterberg 
maintains that "grave doubts of the value of any 
plans which aim to secure future peace by the 
traditional type of agreements and treaties" may 
be most properly entertained. He added *'we 
live in the midst of a war in which one belligerent 
nation after another has felt obliged to disregard 
treaties and to interpret their agreements in a one- 
sided way. Only yesterday Italy without any 
reason of vital necessity, annulled an agreement 
and a treaty, which had appeared the firmest in 
European politics, and which yet failed in the first 
hour of clashing interests". In less superabun- 
dant phraseology international morality is 
necessarily disavowed in societies ruled by tribal 
and class sentiment. 

Much terror-stricken description has been 
devoted by english and french writers upon the 
atrocities of the Germans, especially in Belgium — 
the destruction of sculptured fanes and stained 
glass windows scarcely serve the purpose of a 
serious indictment, except in the circles of pro- 
foundly despairing aesthetes — and it can be 
believed. It is again the re-emergence of the 
ancient tribal nature. Much of this may be 
attributable, assuming its truth, to the irrepressi- 
ble outburst of suffering rage at sharp-shooters, 
snipers, and spies, and much too, as Prof. Hender- 
son and John Bigelow and others have said, to the 



Tribe and Class 273 

Intractable demonism of impulse when manhood 
and mercy become syncopated under the visitation 
of a contagious savagery, as was known In our 
Civil War, in a few instances. There certainly 
have been the findings of the Bryce report, and 
there have been also such statements as those of 
Frank Harris, (which according to Arnold Bennett 
should not count for much), "the Germans have 
waged war like civilized human beings, their 
soldiers have been severe but not ruthless In Bel- 
gium, even when dealing with francs-tlreurs, and 
have shown the ordinary Inhabitants almost in- 
variable kindness and countesy, and have taken 
always all care not to destroy cathedrals or works 
of art". 

Are the shameless orgies of the Russians to be 
forgotten In their invasion of Polish Prussia, the 
remorseless and purely satanic deviltry of the mobs 
of Moscow, the ruthless devastation in Milan, and 
even the cold-blooded fury of english slums? It 
is, in this attempt to fasten unparalleled ignomy 
upon Germans, instructive to remember that In 
1870, after the battle of Gravelotte, 100,000 Ger- 
mans, men, women, children, were driven homeless 
out of France, not by the government, but by the 
people, and that the indecent threat of frenchmen 
to disregard the chastity of the women of Baden 
was publicly applauded, and as a minor com- 
mentary upon English self-restraint, let It be 
recalled that for the death of one englishman, 
whose money value was placed at 500,000 dollars, 
(which, was paid). Admiral Kuper bombarded the 



/ 



274 Europe's Handicap — 

wooden town of Kogosima in Japan, and laid it in 
ashes, upon the rather trifling provocation of being 
fired upon by its impotent forts. 

In further illustration of the occasional frenzy 
and Satanic bitterness of cruelty that may overtake 
people as distinguishedly considerate as English- 
men, the words of Justin McCarthy, referring to 
the suppression of a really incompetent uprising 
of negroes in Jamaica, in 1865, may be quoted: 
''meanwhile the carnival of repression was going 
on. The insurrection, or whatever the movement 
was which broke out on October 11th, was over 
long before. It never offered the slightest re- 
sistance to the soldiers. It never showed itself to 
them. An armed insurgent was never seen by 
them. Nevertheless, for weeks after, the hang- 
ings, the floggings, the burnings of houses, were 
kept up. Men were hanged, women were flogged, 
'merely suspect of being suspect.* Many were 
flogged or hanged for no particular reason, but that 
they happened to come in the way of men who were 
in a humour for flogging and hanging. Women — 
to be sure they were only colored women — were 
stripped and scourged by the saviors of society 
with all the delight which a savage village popula- 
tion of the Middle Ages might have felt in tortur- 
ing witches." 

Perhaps it is going back too far to find fault with 
Englishmen on the score of inhumanity, if we re- 
call that Lord North and his colleagues subsidized 
with public money and bribed with food and 
brandy, "the Cherokees and the Senecas, and 



Tribe and Class 275 

turned them loose upon peaceful communities"; 
"to work their will, and glut their ferocity amidst 
a community of English-speaking people who had 
not a single paid and trained soldier to protect 
them." All of these acts are tribal — in the case 
of the outrages upon the American settlers, their 
authors and abettors boasted of titles and had a 
lineage — and while part and parcel of the 
degeneracy of Europe have surely in England been 
replaced by those standards of conduct which this 
American Republic, more than any other agency, 
has triumphantly raised before the dubious recog- 
nition of Europe. 

Americans may be pardoned for not feeling too 
great an admiration for English clemency when 
they recall the death of ten thousand patriots at 
the hands of the english authorities in our Revolu- 
tion at Gowanus Basin, L. I., practically tortured 
to death by exposure, indecency, and starvation. 
Their monument in Fort Green park to-day will 
keep the memory of that outrage unimpaired. 
Only within a few weeks the Austrians have 
published a book recounting the abominations of 
cruelty and insult and neglect by Belgiums, and 
French, and Russians, and Serbs, while apparently 
the superior English have not hesitated to return 
to an ancient misdemeanor, of not supplying 
enough food to prisoners. 

It all is in the tribal way. But what a com- 
mentary these exposures make upon the improved 
moral sense of the world. The very mention of 
these shames confuses the culprits, who have 



276 Europe's Handicap — 

perpetrated them — namely the Royal and Class 
governments of Europe — when, a century ago, 
they might only have excited the reprobation of a 
few enlightened and sympathetic men and women. 
And to whom is the appeal made? To the people 
of this country, where instinctively it is recognized, 
prevail the standards of just feeling, and the 
emancipated cravings of a real humanity. 

Again as to Belgium; the whole question of 
Belgium was a critical one and it had, for many 
years, furnished the tribal statesmen of Europe a 
subject of political speculation. It has now prob- 
ably turned out that Germany to-day feels less 
compunction, or none, when she reviews the conse- 
quences of her invasion of Belgium, because she 
intends to keep it for herself. The logic of Force 
is inviolable for all of the beasts of prey: 

La raison du plus fort est toujour s la meilletire. 

Finally the strange chimera of FRIGHTFUL- 
NESS rises, as it were an infernal exhalation of 
dreadful dreams, petrifying our hearts with the 
crudest fears — rises with some bewitched and 
tortured wand of invention in its withered hands, 
while with the exorcisms of its incessant impreca- 
tions, it summons new agonies of pain, new 
requisitions of courage, new vagaries of dying, new 
desolations, new discretions of surgery, new 
wealths of self-sacrifice from the earth of men and 
women, and scatters the baneful showers of its 
lurid fires of annihilation over square miles of dead 
and dying. It well becomes this indescribable 



Tribe and Class 277 

Europe to cap the long centuries of its carnage and 
blood thirstiness, with this extravaganza of multi- 
plied scourges of murder and extinction. Through 
air and earth and water stalk the keen emissaries 
of Death. War was at first Europe's Practice, 
then it became its Profession, and now it is its 
Creation. Germany has, one is forced to believe, 
utilized the scientific refinements of her labora- 
tories, the mechanical perfection of her workshops, 
the sedulous temper of her drilled legions, to 
exhilirate war with the freshened energies of 
Bellona, to make of men the zealous slaves of the 
Maenads, to outrage Heaven with the brilliant 
blasphemies of her outrage upon civilization. 
And she has no sluggish rivals. They all learn 
quickly. The impious genius of the PIT rules, and 
in the wide spread chancery of his defiling hands 
the great world of enlightened Europe lies a 
struggling victim. The last energies of Tribe and 
Class, in their spendthrift fury of Greed and Envy 
and Fear and Pride have risen to this mortal com- 
bat, but it is no longer Greed or. Envy, or Fear, or 
Pride. It has become — who shall gainsay it — 
the death-grapple of both Tribe and Class with 
something urgent, implacable, massively protestant 
and indignant, the Rights of Human Nature. It 
will not be whether Russia shall extend her Slavic 
domination over new lands, and hold in her hand 
the jewelled minarets of Constantinople; whether 
Italy shall extend her skirts along the Adriatic, 
and renew a commerce lost to her since the six- 
teenth century. It shall not be whether France 



278 Europe's Handicap — 

shall regain Alsace and Lorraine, and receive new 
franchises of conquest in Africa. It is not the 
extrusion of the Turk from Europe, and the new 
divisions of his misgoverned property among the 
Balkan States. It is not whether Austria shall 
curb the aggressions of Russia, or appropriate for 
her satisfaction, and her vengeance, the land of 
Servia. It is not whether England shall receive 
an indemnity for her monstrous outlays, and Bel- 
gium be remade with the compulsory reprisal of 
Germany's confiscations. It is not whether Ger- 
many shall lift from the seas the ban of England's 
monopoly, while she swells territorially to new 
dimensions, and she reaps the price of her efforts 
from the treasuries of her enemies. All such ma- 
terial questions may, indeed must have some sort 
of settlement, but the overshadowing issue is, a 
new international regulation of the nations of 
Europe, and an irreversible decree published by 
the people that they will no longer remain 
TRIBES, and be no longer controlled by CLASS. 
OR — will it be the same old thing over again, the 
chancelleries crowded with schemers, the thrones 
filled with dreamers, the barracks resounding to 
the drop of arms, and the sharp staccatos of the 
drill-majors, the ceaseless preparation against 
depredation, the ofhcious plans of piracy, the end- 
less intrigue of diplomacy, the cherished aspira- 
tions of linguistic supremacy, of tribal hegemony, 
the straining momentum of the Krupps and the 
Creusots, with unheard of, unimaginable ideas of 
filling grave-yards, and seeding the unturned 



Tribe and Class 279 

ground with corpses, the attitudinizing of courts 
and embassies, the empty phraseologies of political 
essayists and pedagogic theorists, the dissimula- 
tions of world-makers, the plot and play of 
antagonized interests in trade, the survival, 
developed to some nth power of monstrous mean- 
ings, of dynastic ambitions, the old game of nation 
against nation, race against race, the intensive 
cultivation of ethnic prejudices, the aimless con- 
tests for place and power, the separative insignia 
of CLASS, the venerable routines of service and 
adulation, the motionless miseries of the useless 
and the unemployed, all of the fecund race of ills 
that accompany the intensification of Tribe, and 
the isolations of Class? 

The TRIBE has monstrously expanded. It 
has become modernly typified or re-created in 
Pan-Germanism, in Pan-Slavism, in Pan-Turkism, 
in Anglo-Saxonism, in Pan-Latinity, in the 
exaggerated quintessential expression of a racial 
idea. The idea rules the units of its vast 
corporeity, within whose depths the ethnic genius 
developes with an unappeasible intensity of self- 
assertion. It is a sublime egotism and a militant 
propagandum. It is a proposition of insanity, a 
national paranoism that surrounds itself with 
enemies, because of its incalculable repulsions. 
Europe has always been tribal — the Englishman, 
the Frenchman, the Italian, the Greek, the Slav, 
German, Magyar, Turk — all tribal, but this 
magnificent incarnation of Tribe-ism, in its 
iconoclastic zeal to destroy all images but its own, 



280 Europe's Handicap — 

becomes spiritual murder, or spiritual suicide. 
The interminable boastings of the former are in- 
comparable trifling compared with this maelstrom 
of centripetal conceit. Listen to Mr. Chamber- 
lain, though in Mr. Chamberlain's thought the 
ascription to Teutonism was intended to embrace 
a wide retinue of nations, including the English 
even the Italian and the French, so far as he dis- 
cerns in these peoples the traces of that transfigur- 
ing teutonic genius which has remade the World. 

"This work of Teutonism is beyond question 
the greatest that has hitherto been accomplished 
by man. It was achieved, not by the delusion of 
'humanity', but by sound selfish power, not by 
belief in authority, but by free investigation, not 
by contentedness with little, but by insatiable 
ravenous HUNGER." The tribal elan may in- 
deed carry a nation far along the path of con- 
quest — conquest of many sorts — not far in the con- 
quest of ideas, or, at any rate, it contravenes the 
evolutionary march of this day's political ideals. 

And on the high crest of Tribe-ism rides the 
bristling splendors of Class. The tribe presup- 
poses the chieftain, who is the concrete summa- 
tion of its character, the tribe coheres through the 
fused enthusiasms of all individuals for their 
expressive leader. Tribe-ism sways primitive 
sentiment, masters it with a positive idolatry, 
when some one, or indeed a group of notables, 
catches the imagination, and become the Avatar 
of its spirit. Tribes meant war : could mean noth- 
ing else, and Tribe-ism continually arrays a na- 



Tribe and Class 281 

tional complex against another. It may be a war 
of plots, subterfuges, tricks, innuendoes, bargains, 
crafty encroachments, and delusive intentions. 
Sooner or later the pressure of resentment or fear 
breaks the tension, and it is again war, but now the 
WAR of MURDER. 

Now the relevant and mighty thing in this 
present war is. What next? The expenditure of 
scorn and blasphemy and hatred over its authors 
or — in the satisfaction of a concrete personality to 
objurgate — its author, is Incomputably wasted 
time and wasted words. The war long expected, 
long prepared for, an Infallible Index Itself of tribal 
and Class disabilities, and which would have come, 
and would have been here, whether Kaiser William 
was a reality or simply non-existent, for other 
names and other beings would have embodied the 
same propaganda, is, let us pray, rapidly approach- 
ing its end. At the moment it would seem that, 
there could be no satisfactory decision, as far as 
the needs or wishes of Tribe and of Class are con- 
cerned, no ecrasement, viz. the peace of annihilation. 
Does It not look like the conventional stale-mate? 

But a decision somewhat more valuable, more 
revolutionary, more Impregnable, as a fact, in 
human consciousness may be anticipated, surely 
may be hoped for. The Progressive Democratiza- 
tion of Europe, the Wholesale Eradication of 
Tribe and of Class. And this decision will be 
reached when It sinks Into the Innermost con- 
sciousness of men and of women, who do and dare, 
that this abominable and monstrous crime Is not 



282 Europe's Handicap — 

Austria's, nor Germany's, nor Russia's, nor 
France's, nor even the crime of the Balkan's nor 
of England, or of Italy, but is the Crime of Europe, 
the culminant climax of its centuries of misrule, 
the pitiless exposure of its vast ethnic fallacy of 
Tribe, and of its terraced delusions of Class. And 
it will then be ordained that Europe shall undergo 
what the biologists have in Biology named a 
MUTATION. 

And what is Mutation? * 

Mutation is the biological analogue of the re- 
ligious phenomenon called "a new being", and 
perhaps the latter conception, as the designation of 
a moral revolution, might best meet the expecta- 
tions of those who wish to see Europe changed. 
It was John Bunyan who, after certain well known 
perturbations of the spirit, expressed a "vehement 
desire to be one of that number who did sit in the 
sunshine", and if the present season of trials will 
change the heart of Europe she too may desire 
to sit in the sunshine of peace and international 
comity and neighborliness. 

Rudolph Eucken says "the German people wish 
unanimously a peace which shall guarantee lasting 
peace and prevent further wars", but his essay 
does not point the way as leading to democratic 



* To-day the theory of mutational change as explaining the 
origin of species has, in high quarters, fallen into disrepute, so 
that an authority — Edward C. Jeffrey — has, rather belligerently, 
written, "the mutation theory of De Vries appears accordingly to 
lag useless on the biological stage, and may apparently be now 
relegated to the limbo of discarded hypothesis." 



Tribe and Class 283 

institutions. England and France, were the 
measure of their likings determined by the men 
and women of the streets and common homes, 
doubtless wish peace, but at present only the 
demands of the leaders are heard, and that, in 
England, may be resumed in such cries of ven- 
geance as mean, for Germany, extinction, and, if 
Mr. H. G. Wells is consulted, a perpetual trade 
boycott against her, and in France, were we to 
believe M. Jean Finot only after Germany has 
been physically crushed, and an indemnity of 
$34,000,000,000 paid. Count Apponyi sees noth- 
ing in the whole matter but the usual struggle for 
possessions, this or that cc5untry has lost, or wishes 
to retain, and the fight for preeminence; "we in 
Austria and Hungary have no serious points of 
conflict with England and France. France after 
1870 had to make an effort to regain her lost 
provinces from Germany, but she must now see 

that the attempt is hopeless England 

too, would have to give up her aspirations to 
absolute naval superiority over all the rest of the 
world, in a dominance which would enable her to 
dictate the affairs of the world." 

Whether the Balkans wish peace or war 
is with them debatable, but on all sides 
there is to be noted the revival of proud 
designs, the fanning into flame of retaliatory 
plots, the crude resurgence of more hatred and 
more vengeance. Bulgaria has been wTonged, 
''Greece acting as the chief villain, and Servia as 
the second villain, backed and instigated by the 



284 Europe's Handicap — 

heavy plotter in the background Russia". 
Servia moodily sulks in her disaster, and in her 
sense of impotence and defeated ambition. Rou- 
mania having taken advantage of Bulgaria's 
plight, to rob her of the province of Dobrudja, 
quietly sets about to await Austria's discomfiture 
to capture the long envied region of Transylvania, 
and frets over her disappointment, because 
Bulgaria watches her like a cat ready to pounce 
upon her back, should she stir, Austria has 
hidden in her heart cherished schemes of holding 
what she has, and finally swelling her southern 
boundaries by the effectual extinction of Servia, 
and the absorption of Albania. Russia moves 
with the predestinated craft and stealth of the 
skulking Bear, for the prize of the centuries — 
Constantinople, and now, nearer than ever, seems 
the vaunted goal of her sleepless hopes — the dream 
of Peter and Katherine. Italy seizes the instant 
to repatriate her thousands who have found at the 
hands of Austria — trusting Italian writers — a 
lingering death or a death even more rapid and 
inexcusable. And Why? The tribal cause again. 
"The Austrian plan is now well known, to 
eradicate the Italian population, and supplant it 
with a Croatian". The Italian has become 
feverish with a desire to redeem his people, as he 
thinks slowly vanishing under the exterminating 
processes of Austrian and German decimation, 
both physical and economic, keeping "vlgorousl}^ 
burning the patriotic fires of the Societies of Trent 
and Trieste, and of Italia Irredenta". Germany, 



Tribe and Class 285 

obsessed to the very bottom of her soul, with the 
apparition — Yea! the bodily presence, of the over- 
powering menace of erasure, fights fiercely, while 
above von Bernhardi, von Bethman— HoUweg, 
von Bulow, von den Goltz, von Clausewitz, 
Treitschke, Hans Delbruck, Frobenius, sublimely 
soars the figure of the Kaiser, in a half God-like 
Assumption, and from the cloud of his trans- 
figuration issues the orgulous pronouncement; 

^^The Army is the foundation of the social structure 
of the Empire.''' 

And again from the^ c lois tered studies of 
pleasant England, illumined by a wit more pas- 
sionate than Swift's, in a phrase more biting 
than Carlyle's, comes the voice of Gilbert K. 
Chesterton; 

"Now w^e, the French and English, do not mean 
this when we call the Prussians barbarians. If 
their cities soared higher than their flying ships, if 
their trains traveled faster than their bullets, we 
should still call them barbarians. We should 
know exactly what we meant by it; and we should 
know that it is true. For we do not mean any- 
thing that is an imperfect civilization by accident. 
We mean something that is the enemy of civiliza- 
tion by design. We mean something that is 
willfully at war with the principles by which 
human society has been made possible hitherto. 
Of course, it must be partly civilized even to 
destroy civilization. Such ruin could not be 
wrought by the savages that are merely unde- 



286 Europe's Handicap — 

veloped or inert. You could not have even Huns 
without horses, or horses without horsemanship. 
You could not have even Danish pirates without 
ships, or ships without seamanship," or, let us add, 
satirists without perversion. Truly from the 
Man on horseback with the SWORD in his hand, 
to the Man in his editorial chair with the PEN, 
all is tribal. Slaughter in the field, and Abuse in 
the closet. 

Where is the MUTATION, the changed being, 
where the awakened sense of the enormity of their 
present relations among the tribes of Europe, 
where Conversion of Mind and Regeneration of 
Conduct — , to utilize the convenient text-book 
terms of religion? They certainly are not very 
apparent. Still only the "Gall of Bitterness and 
Bond of Iniquity". Must the hideous wretched- 
ness continue, until Europe wakes up, or rather 
until some nascent sense of their absolute equality 
as human beings, their undivided goal as workers 
in the solution of the world's enigma, their 
spiritual contemporaneity as servants of righteous- 
ness, suddenly convicts them of national 
profligacy and national murder? 

Such conviction will never practically subdue 
their particularist activities, as long as Class and 
Tribe survive. To the Class — man, as to the 
German Junker, as described by M. Millioud, 
"equality is equality of rank, of worth, of wealth, 
of force, but impersonal equality before the law is 
for him an unnatural thing, an invention of the 
professors which at heart he despises". To the 



Tribe and Class 287 

Tribes-man, nations express best the genius of a 
specialized temperament, his own, and history can 
never be anything else but tribal conflict, in an 
inevitable evolution, whose exorbitant ends are 
finally reached with the Survival of the Fittest; 
with ^'fittest'' meaning the strongest, for in the 
tribal thought material and immaterial issues 
coalesce in the possession of a cosmic Force, which 
Force is both physiological and mental. The 
Class-man is intelligible, and the Tribes-man is 
intelligible also, but neither will bring happiness to 
Europe. We have hinted at a decision that will 
terminate both. How that decision will come — 
if it comes at all — no one can tell, no one even 
fitfully foresee. At last, somehow, we may 
believe, the rising tide of human compassion will 
become a flood, an engulfing destroying flood, and 
on its leaping waves, whose rolling surges will be 
quickened by the tornadoes of something different 
from compassion, the blasts of human wrath, and 
human execration; the ancient, the beautiful, the 
storied, the sacro-sanct edifice of Class will be 
swept from its venerable foundations, and the 
partitions of tribes, the walls of irreconcilable 
prejudice — Nay, perhaps the morticed fences of 
Creed, be levelled to the common ground of our 
common destiny, in the progress of the Ages. 



CHAPTER VIII 

America's Neutrality 

Overwhelmingly important is the conservation 
of this country from the contagion of Europe's 
war-fever. The preservation of our people from 
the slightest participation in the war is evident to 
every one not specifically interested in the issue of 
the war itself, as a partisan or an accomplice. Our 
position though is a trifling embarrassing, as we 
do not seem inclined to keep the scales of our 
sympathies quite evenly balanced, and the fervent 
protests to Germany are not quite satisfactorily — 
or have not been — evened up by our legitimate 
complaints against England's wholesale deporta- 
tion of our neutral commerce from the seas. The 
ruinous general legislation at Washington which 
has destroyed business, has driven our specialists 
in war supplies to probably regard the fratricidal 
contest in Europe as most opportune for business 
purposes, and that exposes us to very plausible 
reproaches, and no inconsiderable amount of 
envious scorn. The one way to overcome possible 
condemnation, is to assert the freedom of our 
merchandise under the limitations of an actual 
blockade, to all ports demanding it. No act 
which would help to free us from entanglements 
should be omitted, no matter if the act ostensibly 
derogates from our technical dignity. For 



Tribe and Class 289 

instance it was surely most inadvertent for the 
Administration to have allowed American citizens 
to expose themselves — at the risk of the whole 
country — on the Lusitania, which was a steamer 
of one of the belligerents, loaded with ammunition, 
intended for one purpose only, the slaughter of 
that belligerent's enemies, and while the new 
method of submarine warfare has not received 
international sanction, it has decidedly come to 
stay, and no reference to previous rescripts or 
protocols will withdraw it from future naval 
adoption throughout the world. There is no 
intention here to excuse the German attack, but 
can it be possibly hidden from all, that in the 
preservation of our strictest neutrality the help 
of each citizen is important, and the avoidance of 
all situations likely to embroil the country with 
the fighting nations should be most circum- 
spectly regarded. 

While these reflections are almost commonplace, 
and have the hearty endorsement of all, not 
truculently disposed to claim unlimited privileges 
of movement, under the present belligerent condi- 
tions, unmindful or simply careless of the peril 
involved for the community, the general question 
of America's Neutrality, in expression at least, is 
not so commonly approved. The daily papers 
while giving the news from both sides with the 
most commendable impartiality, are very far 
from maintaining an irreproachable demeanor of 
neutrality in saying what they think, or what 
they wish. It seems so from the inspection of the 



290 Europe's Handicap — 

great dailies in New York city. The actual ques- 
tion as to whether an attitude of Neutrality is not 
imposed upon us, as a moral necessity or duty, has 
been debated, and a serious importance given to 
the debate by no less an authority and profound 
thinker than Prof. George Trumbull Ladd, and by 
so ingenious and influential a writer as Mr. E. A. 
Bradford. Prof. Trumbull has committed his 
thoughts to paper under the caption of The 
Ethics of Morality and Mr. Bradford less reserved- 
ly in an article entitled The Immorality of Neu- 
trality. 

Of course at the outset, before one becomes in- 
volved in dialectics, and heated by rhetorical 
declamations, it is indispensable to understand 
what we propose to signify by Neutrality, to reach 
a practical conclusion as to its value to ourselves, 
and to perceive clearly the regulations of speech 
and conduct it enforces. If we turn to Kent's 
Commentaries this salutary and unimpeachable 
advice confronts us in the first paragraphs of his 
General Rights and Duties of Neutral Nations, 
''a nation that maintains a firm and scrupulously 
impartial neutrality, and commands the respect 
of all other nations by its prudence, justice, and 
good faith, has the best chance to preserve unim- 
paired the blessings of its commerce, the freedom 
of its institutions, and the prosperity of its 
resources." This has an old time flavor of the 
sort of rhetorical platitudes which those who adopt 
a more picturesque manner of writing, and a less 
respectful demeanor towards the commonplaces of 



Tribe and Class 291 

judicial opinion, may quite superiorly disdain. 
But no display of lavish epithets, or the fervor of 
the moralistic termagant, will at this juncture 
serve the practical — and the final — ends of this 
country, as well as an absolute reservation of 
opinion as between the belligerents, omitting 
nothing that will establish our technical neutrality, 
and receding not an inch from the just respects of 
our rights by all parties concerned, consistent, let 
us add, with the conservation of natural and 
advised safeguards to prevent collision. Now 
exactly what is "technical neutrality"? 

Technical neutrality is the absolute avoidance 
of all assistance to the belligerents that contra- 
venes the present accepted Laws of Nations. It 
means that ''the neutral is not to favor one of 
them to the detriment of the other; and it is an 
essential character of neutrality, to furnish no aids 
to one party which the neutral is not equally 
ready to furnish to the other". Again "the 
principal restriction which the law of nations im- 
poses on the trade of neutrals, is the prohibition 
to furnish the belligerent parties with warlike 
stores, and other articles which are directly 
auxiliary to warlike purposes." Again "a neutral 
may also forfeit the immunities of his national 
character by violations of the blockade; and 
among the rights of belligerents, there is none 
more clear and incontrovertible, or more just and 
necessary in the application, than that which 
gives rise to the law of blockade" ; but "a blockade 
must be existing in point of fact; and in order to 



292 Europe's Handicap — 

constitute that existence, there must be a power 
present to enforce it. All decrees and orders, declar- 
ing extensive coasts and whole countries in a state of 
blockade, without the presence of an adequate 
naval force to support it, are manifestly illegal 
and void, and have no sanction in public law". 
Now the particular instances in which this 
country may become involved both with England 
and Germany on the question of her * 'technical 
neutrality", are most conspicuously, the exporta- 
tion of munitions of war to England, and the ex- 
portation of food-stuffs, cotton and other hitherto 
considered non-contraband goods to Germany. 
England overriding all previous considerations 
which have delimited the character of oversea 
commerce, in the vessels of neutrals, has deter- 
mined to prohibit almost all intercourse between 
this country and Germany, and has ignored the 
proposals of this government to adhere to those 
"rules of fairness, reason, justice and humanity 
which all modern opinion regards as imperative". 
Not only are the shipments of not-contraband to 
Germany interdicted, but the freedom of shipment 
of the same to other neutral ports has been 
summarily interfered with. Neither has she 
maintained any practical blockade before the 
ports of Germany, but has exercised the peremp- 
tory right of seizure on the high seas, the only 
justification for which must rest in some assump- 
tion that the circumstances of this war cancel all 
the recognized contrivances and regulations of 
neutral commerce, hitherto conceived as inviolate. 



Tribe and Class 293 

On the other hand in retaliation, Germany 
devises a hitherto unused and indeed hitherto 
unknown method of submarine blockade, which 
proves terrifically effective, but introduces an 
entirely new set of considerations in the relations 
of neutrals and belligerents, inasmuch as the 
nature of the new instrumentality does not readily 
admit of the customary methods of stopping ships, 
and inspecting the cargoes of the suspected vessel. 
It is — if an enemy's boat — torpedoed and sunk. 

Against both of these conditions the United 
States has protested, and has received no satisfac- 
tion. Nor will she. The embittered contest 
between the belligerents fbrbid concessions which 
might prove disastrous or injurious to either, and 
the neutral nations must make the best of it as 
they can. Under these circumstances the issue is 
plain. The depredations from both must be borne 
or resisted. Resistance can take the form of war- 
like protection for our ships, by naval convoys, or 
we can withdraw from any and all commerce 
between ourselves and England and Germany. 

It is quite aside from the purpose of this essay 
to discuss so difficult and dangerous a question. 
But it is clear that the contentions of Mr. Bradford 
and Prof. Ladd are inadmissible. The attitude of 
neutrality, from every reasonable, practical, and 
sane point of view, is absolutely the wisest, and 
the best, and the immoderate claims of both of 
these writers — though their exact and specific 
recommendations are not very coherently made — 
must be, in the interests of the whole nation, and 



294 Europe's Handicap — 

with deference to the very contrasted opinions 
held by its citizens, utterly rejected. It is an 
attitude of questionable propriety to inject, as 
some editors do, in our more prominent papers, the 
unreserved animus of their hostility to Germany, 
even though they more decorously insist that their 
sentiments of admiration for the German people, 
as a people, remain unchanged. The European 
squabbles, and the enraged combats of TRIBE 
and CLASS should have no encouragement from 
Americans, and no overt or foolish act of ours 
should lead to that most lamentable disaster of 
our engaging, by participation, in their settlement. 



CHAPTER IX 
Germanization 

It has always been regarded as a piece of in- 
comparable humour, delicioussatire, and admirable 
invention, among the various hallucinations of 
the invincible Knight of La Mancha, that he was 
bewitched enough by his lunacy to convert wind- 
mills into giants, to descry in a wretched inn, a 
castle, in its sorry wench, a beauteous princess, to 
make out of two clouds of dust, raised by two 
flocks of sheep, two great armies, one led by the 
great emperor Alifanfaron, Lord of the great island 
of Taprobana, and the other by the king of the 
Garamantes, Pentapolin of the naked arm, while 
the very pinnacle of fun is reached, in the magical 
story, when he of the sorrowful figure retires to 
the mountains of the Sierra Morena, to imitate 
the penance of Beltenebrose and conceives the 
barber's basin to be the Helmet of Mambrino. 

We can almost believe that the future historian 
of this European conflict will be inclined to 
catalogue, along with these madnesses of Don 
Quixote, the ravings of the editors, and the essay- 
ists, the casual letter writers, and the journalistic 
poets, who to-day prophecy that in the victory of 
the Germans, some sort of paganization of Europe 
will ensue, and the vast process of Germanization 
of the world will be begun, with the utter expulsion 



296 Europe's Handicap — 

from it of all beauty, civilization, and the decorous 
relations of its inhabitants, under the sterilizing 
force of teutonic harshness, dullness, merciless 
precision, and militant despotism. This German- 
ization becomes to some minds, endowed with 
effective imagination and hysterical nerves, a 
most awful certainty, without their considering 
whether the extension of a rule, which, in its own 
borders, has produced a distributed content and 
most fruitful efficiency, is so altogether obnoxious 
to human needs. 

But how essentially foolish this terror is — and 
that it is a terror is witnessed by the words of such 
writers as Grace Atherton, Mr. Chesterton, 
H. G. Wells, Kipling, and even the capricious and 
gay-witted Poultney Bigelow, not to speak of the 
heavier and really tiresome Jeremiads of the pro- 
fessors — a moment's reflection shows. The war 
has reached a vindictive stage which means, for 
the present, its bitter prolongation, and only one 
consequence can flow from even a short continua- 
tion, a consequence that recently has been well 
summarized by Prof. George Simmel in his article 
in the Tagehlatt; 

"America stands hear by as the waiting heir at 
the deathbed of a rich testator — Europe sends not 
a small part of its fortune to America, and the 
equivalent which it receives it blows into the air, 
or rather, it uses for the better execution of its 
suicide, to hasten the succession of America to the 

world-throne Is Europe insane that it 

commits this hara-kari?" 



Tribe and Class 297 

What are the facts? Six nations — among them 
the most powerful and richest in Europe — are 
fighting fiercely for predominacne; it is as yet not 
quite clear what exactly they are fighting for. 
They are putting forth all the power they can 
exert, and they are spending all the money they 
can raise. The figures — even if roughly and care- 
lessly compiled — are stupifying. There may be 
15 millions of men in arms, some two millions have 
been killed, and some five times that number 
wounded, and the money outlay so far probably 
exceeds $6,000,000,000! 

The conclusion forced upon one, viewing the 
contest impartially, is that exhaustion alone will 
terminate it, unless — as hinted in the body of this 
essay — the PEOPLE demand its cessation. We 
are told by a number of unauthorized and more or 
less emotional guessers, that the war will last a 
year more, and three years more, but the slightest 
glance at the expenditures of money and men 
would seem to make any considerable prolonga- 
tion of the insane struggle preposterous. It 
certainly will last longer, and at the terrific rate 
of consumption of material, even a few more 
months of it will disturb to their foundations the 
financial resources of the various countries, upset 
their industries, and thrust upon their populations 
new eventualities of effort to regain their wealth. 
If Germany can hold what she has gained she will 
be lucky, and the Germanization of that will not 
so frightfully disfigure the earth, or make the 
existence of the rest of it impossible. England will 



298 Europe's Handicap — 

certainly remain England, and France, France, 
Italy, Italy, and the whole expression of the world 
practically subsist unchanged. If Germanization 
means, (besides that mechanical regulation which 
rules the mind and the body and society, with an 
inflexible predisposition to make the most of 
themselves) also the dread thing labelled MILI- 
TARISM; then indeed there is reason for alarm, 
for again that includes the perpetuation of TRIBE 
and CLASS. 

On this latter question hangs the welfare of the 
future of Europe. Democratization is its absolute 
remedy. Militarism in the last years has been 
afforded an exaggerated status in Germany but it 
has not been absent anywhere in Europe. In Ger- 
many it gains a spectacular effrontery because of 
its signal efficiency. Arms and armies have been 
always the bane of the continent, and nothing will 
dissipate the tribal spirit and the class pride that 
encourages them, but the vigorous injection into 
the political thought and feeling of the peoples 
the need of popular ascendency in government and 
the utter obliteration of HEREDITARY SYM- 
BOLS. 

Can that be accomplished? Will the shattering 
throes of this effort at mutual extinction bring 
about so superhuman an upheaval? Possibly. 
There will be change, perhaps a deep movement for 
reconstitution of political traditions, but in many 
aspects of the problem, a solution, embodying a 
definite assimilation of the American spirit 
throughout Europe, seems almost incredible. 



Tribe and Class 299 

If Germanization means the universal exten- 
sion of the use of the tongue of Schiller and of 
Goethe, that is an absurdity, although, were it 
probable, the incoherent frenzy of fear in those 
talking about Germanization, might be fully 
condoned. But no such dreadful catastrophe is 
conceivable. Can any one imagine a frenchman, 
and the french nation to boot, abandoning their 
language for the shocking cacophony of german; 

To cleave the general ear with horrid speech, 

and be lost in its maelstrom of inverted clauses? 
Is it believable that the Italians, under any inflic- 
tion less than death, would exchange their Parnas- 
sian melodies for the rude grotesqueries of the 
Teuton? Is the language of Cervantes likely to 
be replaced by the multisyllabic obfuscation of 
Schlegel? Will the countrymen of Shakespeare 
learn to put genders on their articles of speech, 
and separate the prefixes and suffixes of their 
verbs? 

Never, on your life, or — more eloquently, 

That will never he: 
Who can impress the forest; hid the tree 
Unfix his earth-hound root? 

Does Germanization mean that we shall all 
worship Gambrinus and drink beer, fertilize our 
bowels with the messes of a delicatessen shop, and 
subdue our noses to the tyranny of Limburger? 

Impossible; all kinds of fit eating are beloved 



300 Europe's Handicap — 

by men, tolerated, respected, even tried, but the 
familiar dish remains inviolate; 

Ye pow'rs wha mak mankind your care 
And dish them out their hill o' fare, 
Auld Scotland wants nae skinking ware 

That jaups in luggies: 
But, if ye wish her gratefu' pray'r, 
Gie her a Haggis 

Perhaps this dreadful Germanization implies that 
we shall hear no other music than that of Wagner 
and Dr. Strauss. The Kaiser and all his legions 
will not accomplish that. Good tunes are im- 
perishable. No one need blanch with terror at 
the thought of losing either Pinafore or Rigoletto, 
Carmen, (indeed we have heard that the Kaiser 
is himself partial to Bizet), or Traviata. The 
german terror will not scare them off the foot-stool, 
whatever else it may do. Germanized in our 
music! Nonsense. That is madness, and the 
wide aspiration for music of all sorts among men 
and women, with the actual increasing phenome- 
non of cosmopolitanism in musical taste forbids 
this calamity. The german musical terror passed 
away a long time ago. Has not James Huneker — 
a man not forbearing to the melomaniacs — said, 
" 'with what infantile malignancy was regarded the 
lead pencil of the German music-master!' Why, 
even as I write, my very sentence assumes an 
OUendorffian cast because of the harrowing atmos- 
phere conjured up by that same irritable Teutonic 
pencil-wielder!", but now, "poets no longer make 



Tribe and Class 301 

sonnets to our Ladies of Ivories, nor are budding 
girls chained to the keyboard." Abolish rag-time? 
Rash thought. Verbum sat sapienti. 

Well what other catastrophe threatens us from 
Germanization? Learning? We shall become en- 
cyclopaedic. Heaven forbid. Must we become 
quid-nuncs who, like the knight-errant described 
by the knight of La Mancha, "must be learned in 
the law, and understand distributive and com- 
munitative justice, must be conversant in divinity, 
must be skilled in medicine, especially in botany 
that he may know how to cure the disease with 
which he may be afflicted, must be an astronomer, 
must understand mathematics", with all of which 
the Spaniard also conjoined, (and surely the teu- 
tono-phobists will not object), "all the cardinal 
and theological virtues." Well to be a Paragon 
and a Dictionary is an almost inconceivable 
misery, for then we should become what Mr. 
Huneker has designated, "the new individual in 
literaturecreatedbyMr.Shaw"— ^5t/P£i?-C^i9. 

Hoc valde vitium periculosum est. 
Non tigris catulis citata raptis, 
Non dipsas medio perusta sole, 
Nee sic scorpios improbus timetur. 
Nam tantos, rogo, quis ferat labores? 

Or perhaps Germanization means the things 
Miss Meredith has so pointedly alluded to, 
(Letter to the N. Y. Times), when she writes; 

"Let us compare our own progress in these 
respects with that which Germany can show, 



302 Europe's Handicap — 

for instance, for it seems to me that the duty 
of the State to its citizens is more keenly real- 
ized and more conscientiously fulfilled in 
Germany than in any other country". 
Her Bill of Particulars, as a record of Merit, is 
rather convincing, (See original letter). And if 
she is right — Mrs. Atherton's enchantment over 
Munich confirms her praise, — then it would 
almost seem that Germanization to this extent 
conforms rather propitiously with the admitted 
functions of government, as instanced by the 
Englishman John Stuart Mill, inasmuch as ''they 
embrace a much wider field than can easily be 
included within the ring-fence of any restrictive 
definition, and that it is hardly possible to find 
any ground of justification common to them all, 
except the comprehensive one of general ex- 
pediency; nor to limit the interference of govern- 
ment by any universal rule, save the single and 
vague one that it should never be admitted, but 
when the case of expediency is strong". 

But pleasantries and innuendoes aside, what 
Germanization means, to those shuddering before 
the awful menace, is understood. It means a dis- 
astrous infusion of Force and Rule in social rela- 
tions, the substitution of Hardness for Geniality, 
and of that heathenism of taste that afflicts the 
shrinking Chesterton, when he finds the germans 
putting arms on the Venus of Milo, that "would 
look at once like the arms of a woman at a wash- 
tub". It means to the same embittered aesthete, 
**a failure in honor, which almost amounts to a 



Tribe and Class 303 

failure in memory; and egomania that is honestly 
blind to the fact that the other party is an ego, and, 
above all, an actual itch for tyranny and inter- 
ference, the devil which everywhere torments the 
idle and the proud", and to innumerable Ameri- 
cans — frightfully anglicized — it means an actual 
world-empire, of which however the very mention 
is its own utter refutation. 

All of this agitation before the Furor Teutonicus 
is hopelessly childish. At the completion of this 
war Germany and all of Europe will be a material 
and moral devastation. Flat on its back, neither 
Germanization nor any other nationalism, as a 
process of subjugation, or a" propagandum of ideas, 
will be thought of. The big problem of recupera- 
tion will occupy fully the mind of the moribund 
patients. They will be also given plenty of time 
to think, whether TRIBE and CLASS can be and 
ought not to be exterminated. In a different way 
from the mode of this essay Mr. H. G. Wells has 
well summarized a similar conclusion. Rewrites; 

"Unless this does help to bring about a lasting 
peace in the world it is idle to pretend that it will 
have been anything else but a monstrous experi- 
ence of evil. If, at the end, of it we cannot bring 
about some world-wide political synthesis, unani- 
mous enough and powerful enough to prohibit 
further wars by a stupendous array of moral and 
material force, then all this terrible year of stress 
and suffering has been no more than a waste of life, 
and our sons and brothers and friends and allies 
have died in vain. If we cannot summon enough 



304 Europe's Handicap — 

goodwill and wisdom in the world to establish a 
world alliance and a world congress to control the 
clash of legitimate national aspirations and con- 
flicting interests, and to abolish all the forensic 
trickeries of diplomacy, then this will be neither 
the last war, nor will it be the worst, and men 
must prepare themselves to face a harsh and terri- 
ble future, to harden their spirits against continu- 
ing and increasing adversity, and to steel their 
children to cruelty and danger. Revenge will 
become the burthen of history." 

The progressive democratization of Europe, the 
total obliteration of Tribe and Class — if such an 
event is conceivably possible — and the assimila- 
tion of the American liberality of sentiment, and 
humanity of purpose, and ubiquity of sympathy, 
and permanence of ideals, and toleration of altru- 
istic designs, might effect the Mutation, we at 
least can dream of in Europe, or, by a Permutation 
more gradual and more stable, achieve its redemp- 
tion. 



I. SAMUEL, VIII, 9-22 

9. Now therefore hearken unto their voice: ho wbeit, yet pro- 
test solemnly unto them, and shew them the manner of the king 
that shall reign over them. 

10. And Samuel told all the words of the Lord unto the people 
that asked of him a king. 

11. And'he said, This will be the manner of the king that shall 
reign over you: He will take your sons, and appoint them for 
himself, for his chariots, and to be his horsemen; and jowe shall 
run before his chariots. 

12. And he will appoint him captains over thousands, and 
captains over fifties; and will set them to ear his ground, and to 
reap his harvest, and to make his instruments of war, and instru- 
ments of his chariots. 

13. And he will take your daughters to be confectionaries, and 
to be cooks, and to be bakers. 

14. And he will take your fields^ and your vineyards, and your 
oliveyards, even the best of them, and give them to his servants. 

15. And he will take the tenth of your seed, and of your vine- 
yards, and give to his officers, and to his servants. 

16. And he will take your men-servants, and your maid- 
servants, and your goodliest young men, and your asses, and put 
them to his work. 

17. He will take the tenth of your sheep: and ye shall be his 
servants. 

18. And ye shall cry out in that day because of your king which 
ye shall have chosen you ; and the Lord will not hear you in that 
day. 

19. Nevertheless, the people refused to obey the voice of 
Samuel; and they said, Nay; but we will have a king over us; 

20. That we also may be like all the nations; and that our 
king may judge us, and go out before us, and fight our battles. 

21. And Samuel heard all the words of the people, and he 
rehearsed them in the ears of the Lord. 

22. And the Lord said to Samuel, Hearken unto their voice, 
and make them a king. And Samuel said unto the men of Israel, 
Go ye every man unto his city. 



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